Word.ws English Dictionary

by the bye

by the bye is the alternative spelling of by the by.

Meaning of by the by

Prepositional phrase

  1. Used to introduce a new topic; incidentally, by the way.
    • Now, Mrs. Clarke was one of those to whom caps and crape were the very morality of mourning—she was not the only one, by the by, with whom propriety stands for principle,...1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter I, in Romance and Reality. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, pages 70-71

See all 2 meanings of by the by

Questions about by the bye

What is by the bye the alternative spelling of?
By the bye is the alternative spelling of by the by.

Words near by the bye in the dictionary

  1. by some distance
  2. by starts and leaps
  3. by steam
  4. by the book
  5. by the by
  6. by the bye
  7. by the day
  8. by the dozen
  9. by the ears
  10. by the eye
  11. by the gods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by the bye (page history and authors); by the 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.

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