bray, verb transitive2

/breɪ/
Forms:
brae, braidShow more Also brae, braid, brei, and (often) brey.
Origin:
South African Dutch, Dutch, modern AfrikaansShow more Englished form of South African Dutch breien to prepare skins, from Dutch bereiden to prepare (the modern Afrikaans form being brei).
To soften (leather) by scraping, twisting, and working it until it is pliable. Also combination bray-paal/-pɑːl/ [South African Dutch paal pole], a device upon which leather thongs are worked by being hung and twisted by means of a heavy weight; braying-pole, see braying sense 2.
1822 W.J. Burchell Trav. I. 351Such an apparatus is called by them, and by the colonists, who also make use of it, a Brey-paal. [Source Note: The trunk of a tree is fixed up near the hut, for the purpose of preparing (or as they call it breyen) leathern riems.]
1833 Graham’s Town Jrnl 25 Apr. 4She was tramping (or breying) some skins.
1849 J.D. Lewins Diary. 20 Nov.Bester offers to bray & tan my sheepskins on the half.
1851 T. Shone Diary. 11 Apr.Boy Jack was braying a bush buck skin for whip cord.
1863 Queenstown Free Press 3 Mar.The native was sentenced to be pegged out to a bray paal and receive 25 lashes with a stirrup leather.
1863 Lady Duff-Gordon in F. Galton Vacation Tourists (1864) III. 192The..Hottentots can’t ‘bray’ the skins as the Caffres do; and the women who did mine..let them dry halfway in the process, consequently they don’t look so well.
1913 A. Glossop Barnes’s S. Afr. Hsehold Guide 318Proceed to brei between the hands or (if a cow or ox skin) by treading out with the bare feet.
1925 S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner in F.C. Slater Centenary Bk of S. Afr. Verse 61The hardy Boer..cut the strip And brei’d and rolled and hammered it round to make the Wagon-whip.
1946 H.C. Bosman in L. Abrahams Unto Dust (1963) 164Anything would be straight enough for him — even if it was something as twisted as a raw oxhide thong that you brei with a stick and a heavy stone slung from a tree.
1961 S. Cloete in Best of S. Afr. Short Stories (1991) 288It gave him great pleasure to brey the skins, to cut them and fit them. Ja, he made the children’s shoes and his wife cut their nails.
1994 Grocott’s Mail 20 Sept. 5 (caption)Captain Trapps..explains various ways of breying hides to young ‘Settlers’.
To soften (leather) by scraping, twisting, and working it until it is pliable. Also combination bray-paal/-pɑːl/ [South African Dutch paal pole], a device upon which leather thongs are worked by being hung and twisted by means of a heavy weight; braying-pole, see braying sense 2.
Derivatives:
Hence brayer  noun, a scraper, used to work skins.
1945 N. Devitt People & Places 118Lying beside the skeleton was the property of the dead man. A grinding stone and a fine specimen of a skin ‘breyer’ — made of bone, well-shaped.
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brayer

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brandywine, nounn.brayed, participial adjectivepart. adj.
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