Word.ws English Dictionary

by-

by- prefix: town or city.

Prefix (1)

by-

  1. (now mostly non-productive) Town or city.
    • bylaw

Prefix (2)

by-

  1. Near or roundabout.
    • bystander, bypass
  2. Secondary, incidental, or parallel to.
    • by-product, byform, by-path, by-book

Forms of by-

alternative formbye-

Origin of by-

From Middle English by (“town”), of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse býr (“dwelling, town”), from Proto-Germanic *būwiz (“dwelling”). Cognate with Danish by (“town”). More at bower.

Partly from a combining form of by (“by, near, around”), and partly continuing Middle English bi-, by-, from Old English bī- (“by, near, around”), from Proto-Germanic *bi-, whence also be-. Cognate with Dutch bij-, German bei-.

Questions about by-

What does by- mean?
By- means town or city.
What part of speech is by-?
By- is a prefix.

Words near by- in the dictionary

  1. by your leaves
  2. by'm-by
  3. by'r
  4. by'r lady
  5. by't
  6. by-
  7. by-and-by
  8. by-bidder
  9. by-bidders
  10. by-blow
  11. by-blows

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by- (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: “by-.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by-. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.