Word.ws English Dictionary

bai

bai noun: a marshy meadow in sub-Saharan Africa. Also the eye dialect spelling of bye.

bai: a marshy meadow in sub-Saharan Africa
Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

bai (plural bais)

  1. A marshy meadow in sub-Saharan Africa.
    • One thing about the bais that I hadn't fully taken on board while reading about them was that they tend to be waterlogged because they are usually associated with marshes, streams or springs. […] venturing into the bai, but […] plunging into the bai because […]2012 August 23, Nick Middleton, Surviving Extremes: Ice, Jungle, Sand and Swamp, Pan Macmillan, →ISBN, page 84
    • Gorillas (and other wildlife) frequent such bais, which are waterlogged and sunny, because of the sodium-rich sedges and asters that grow beneath the open sky.2012, David Quammen, Spillover, →ISBN, page 64

Noun (2)

bai (plural bais)

  1. A yellow mist occurring in spring and fall in China and Japan, caused by yellow dust blown from central China.

Noun (3) capitalized: Bai

Bai pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) An ethnic group of China.

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Bai

Bai

  1. A surname.
  2. The language of the Bai ethnic group.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Bai

Bai

  1. An island off the coast of Sabah, Malaysia

Also used as

bai is also the eye dialect spelling of bye.

bai meaning in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam

bai in Tamil

பாயி

bai in Telugu

బాయి

bai in Malayalam

ബായി

Forms of bai

pluralbais
alternative formBái

Origin of bai

Borrowed from Japanese 霾 (bai). First recorded in English in the 1910s.

From Chinese 白 (Bái). Doublet of Bach (Vietnamese surname).

Borrowed from Malay Bai.

Phrases with bai

Questions about bai

What does bai mean?
Bai means a marshy meadow in sub-Saharan Africa.
What is bai in Tamil?
Bai in Tamil is பாயி. See Bai meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is bai?
Bai can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of bai?
The plural of bai is bais.

Words near bai in the dictionary

  1. Bahía
  2. Bahía Blanca
  3. Bahía de Caráquez
  4. Bahā'allāh
  5. Bahā'u'llāh
  6. bai
  7. bai ji
  8. bai zhi
  9. Baia
  10. Baia de Aramă
  11. Baia de Arieș

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bai (page history and authors); Bai (page history and authors); bai (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); bai (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); bai (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: “bai.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bai. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.