Word.ws English Dictionary

byplays

byplays is the plural of byplay.

Meaning of byplay

Noun

byplay (countable and uncountable, plural byplays)

  1. Any action, carried out onstage during a performance, apart from the main action.
    • [...] there had been some amusing byplay with the enginemen as to what might be expected to happen if the engines failed to behave themselves properly.1959 October, Cecil J. Allen, “Locomotive Running Past and Present”, in Trains Illustrated, page 477
  2. Any action, by supporting actor.

Questions about byplays

What is byplays the plural of?
Byplays is the plural of byplay.

Words near byplays in the dictionary

  1. bypath
  2. bypaths
  3. byplace
  4. byplaces
  5. byplay
  6. byplays
  7. bypoll
  8. bypolls
  9. byproduct
  10. byproducts
  11. Byram

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: byplays (page history and authors); byplay (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-byplays.wav.

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