In its literal sense, abrade refers to the physical wearing down of a surface through friction. In poetry, it appears as a craft term when a poet uses tactile or material imagery to evoke damage, pressure, or gradual change. It can also support metaphors of emotional abrasion, where experience wears at the self as rubbing wears stone or wood.

Abrade derives from the Latin abradere, meaning to scrape off, and belongs to a family of craft terms that describe how surfaces are altered by contact and time, alongside erode, wear, and scour; poets use abrasion to suggest that meaning or feeling is not static but is gradually worn down through repeated exposure, making it a useful term for discussing poems about aging, grief, or environmental change; it pairs well with tactile and auditory imagery, since abrasion often implies both a physical sensation and a sound, such as grinding or rasping, which can shape a poem's sonic texture as much as its visual one.