Word.ws English Dictionary

abray

abray is the obsolete form of abraid.

Meaning of abraid

Verb

abraid (third-person singular simple present abraids, present participle abraiding, simple past and past participle abraided or abraid)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) To wrench (something) out.
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To unsheathe a blade, draw a weapon.
  3. (intransitive, obsolete) To wake up.
    • She ferde as she had stert out of a sleep, / Til she out of hire mazednesse abreyde.1387–1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Clerke of Oxenfordes Tale”, in The Canterbury Tales, [Westminster: William Caxton, published 1478], →OCLC; republished in [William Thynne], editor, The Workes of...
  4. (archaic, intransitive) To spring, start, make a sudden movement.
  5. (intransitive, obsolete, transitive) To shout out.
  6. (obsolete, transitive) To rise in the stomach with nausea.

Forms of abray

third-person singular presentabrays
present participleabraying
past participleabrayed
pastabrayed

Origin of abray

Back-formation from the preterite abraid, abrayde. More at abraid.

Words that rhyme with abray

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about abray

What is abray the obsolete form of?
Abray is the obsolete form of abraid.

Words near abray in the dictionary

  1. abraum
  2. Abraum salts
  3. abraxane
  4. abraxas
  5. abraxases
  6. abray
  7. abrayed
  8. abraying
  9. abrays
  10. abrazo
  11. abrazos

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: abray (page history and authors); abraid (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “abray.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/abray. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.