Word.ws English Dictionary

cly

cly verb: to seize; to steal.

Verb

cly (third-person singular simple present clies, present participle clying, simple past and past participle clied)

  1. (obsolete, slang, transitive) To seize; to steal.
    • Wapping thou I know does love, / Else the ruffin cly the mort; / From thy stampers then remove, / Thy drawers, and let's prig in sport.1707, “The Maunder's Praise of his Strowling Mort”, in Farmer, John Stephen, editor, Musa Pedestris, published 1896, page 34

Noun

cly (plural clies)

  1. (obsolete, slang) A person's pocket.

cly meaning in Bengali

cly in Bengali

আটক করা, চুরি করা, কোনো ব্যক্তির পকেট

Forms of cly

Verb
third-person singular presentclies
present participleclying
past participleclied
pastclied
Noun
pluralclies

Origin of cly

Probably related to claw (compare Low German kleien, klaien (“to claw, scratch, grasp, seize”), dialectal German klauen, kläuen, kleuen (“to steal”), German klauen (“to steal, rip off”)). Alternatively referred by some to Dutch kleed (“a garment”); "to fake a cly" was to take a garment.

Words formed from cly

Phrases with cly

Words that rhyme with cly

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about cly

What does cly mean?
Cly means to seize; to steal.
What is cly in Bengali?
Cly in Bengali is আটক করা, চুরি করা, কোনো ব্যক্তির পকেট. See Cly meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is cly?
Cly can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of cly?
The past tense of cly is clied.

Words near cly in the dictionary

  1. clutzes
  2. CLV
  3. CLVs
  4. cLWTS
  5. Clwyd
  6. cly
  7. clyack
  8. Clybucca
  9. Clyburn
  10. Clyburns
  11. Clydach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cly (page history and authors); cly (Bengali Wiktionary) (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: “cly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.