Word.ws English Dictionary

bestay

bestay verb: to secure or steady; cause to come to a fixed position or state; bring to a halt or stop.

Verb

bestay (third-person singular simple present bestays, present participle bestaying, simple past and past participle bestayed)

  1. (transitive) To secure or steady; cause to come to a fixed position or state; bring to a halt or stop.
    • Mid the half-furrowed field bestay the plough, Bid the twin toilers of the yoke go free, And aught that doth thee patient servitude, From closing sabbath to its blest return, [...]1834, Theodore Sedwick Fay, George Pope Morris, Samuel Woodworth, New-York mirror
    • Hereupon the magistrates of the town cried "Hola, hola, bestay the matter."1874, Great Britain. Public Record Office, Calendar of state papers, foreign series, of the reign of Elizabeth

Forms of bestay

third-person singular presentbestays
present participlebestaying
past participlebestayed
pastbestayed

Origin of bestay

From be- + stay, from Middle English *stayen, steyen, from Old French estaier, estayer (“to prop, stay, support”), from estaye (“prop, support”), of Proto-Germanic origin. More at stay.

Questions about bestay

What does bestay mean?
Bestay means to secure or steady; cause to come to a fixed position or state; bring to a halt or stop.
What part of speech is bestay?
Bestay is a verb.
What is the past tense of bestay?
The past tense of bestay is bestayed.

Words near bestay in the dictionary

  1. bestarred
  2. bestarring
  3. bestars
  4. bestatin
  5. bestatued
  6. bestay
  7. Beste
  8. bestead
  9. besteaded
  10. besteading
  11. besteads

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bestay (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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