Word.ws English Dictionary

aya

/ˈaɪə/

aya is the alternative form of ayah.

Meaning of ayah

Noun (1)

ayah (plural ayahs)

  1. A South Asian female servant, maid or nanny, historically, often one working for Europeans in South Asia.
    • She manufactured the Station scandal, and talked to her ayah.1888, Rudyard Kipling, “Watches of the Night”, in Plain Tales from the Hills (fiction)

Noun (2)

ayah (plural ayahs or ayat)

  1. A verse in the Quran.

Adverb

aya (not comparable)

  1. (New-England, archaic, dialectal) Yes; yea; aye.
    • “The date is May 7, 1901, just before dawn. (COCK CROW offstage.) Aya, just about.”1938, Thornton Wilder, Our Town: A Play in Three Acts, Coward-McCann and Samuel French, published 1965, →ISBN
    • “And for all her reading, her remarkable knowledge of English poetry and literature, she was never to lose certain countrified Yankee patterns of speech, saying 'Canady' for Canada, as an example, using 'set' for sit, or the old New England 'aya,' for yes.”2001, David McCullough, John Adams, Simon & Schuster, published 2001, →ISBN

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Aya

Aya

  1. (Mesopotamian mythology) In Akkadian mythology, a mother goddess, consort of the sun god Shamash.
  2. 55565 Aya, a trans-Neptunian object and likely dwarf planet; named after said goddess.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Aya

Aya

  1. A female given name from Japanese.

Noun capitalized: AYA

AYA (plural AYAs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of adolescent or young adult.
    • Near-synonyms: YA, young adult
    • In this study, the AYAs were stratified for risk and were assigned to a treatment arm via randomization.
    Synonyms:
    YA, young adult

Synonyms of aya

Forms of aya

Noun
pluralayas
pluralAYAs
Proper noun
alternative formAja

Origin of aya

The planetoid was named after the Akkadian goddess, which began with the same first letter as the provisional designation 2002 AW₁₉₇.

Borrowed from Japanese あや (Aya).

Questions about aya

What does aya mean?
Aya means yes; yea; aye.
What is aya the alternative form of?
Aya is the alternative form of ayah.
What part of speech is aya?
Aya can be an adverb, a proper noun or a noun.
How do you pronounce aya?
Aya is pronounced /ˈaɪə/.

Words near aya in the dictionary

  1. ay up me duck
  2. ay, ay
  3. ay, chihuahua
  4. ay-green
  5. ay^
  6. aya
  7. Ayaan
  8. Ayaas
  9. ayacahuite pine
  10. ayacahuite pines
  11. Ayacucho

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: aya (page history and authors); Aya (page history and authors); AYA (page history and authors); ayah (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.

Last updated:

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