Word.ws English Dictionary

doyly

doyly is the archaic form of doily.

Meaning of doily

Noun

doily (plural doilies)

  1. A small ornamental piece of lace or linen or paper used to protect a surface from scratches by hard objects such as vases or bowls; or to decorate a plate of food.
    • She looked polite, and observed the oiled floors, hard-wood staircase, unused fireplace with tiles which resembled brown linoleum, cut-glass vases standing upon doilies, and the barred, shut, forbidding unit bookcases that were half filled with swashbuckler novels and unread-looking sets of...1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, →OCLC
  2. (Judaism) A similar circular piece of lace worn as a head-covering by some married Jewish women.
  3. (obsolete) An old kind of woollen material.

Forms of doyly

pluraldoylies

Questions about doyly

What is doyly the archaic form of?
Doyly is the archaic form of doily.

Words near doyly in the dictionary

  1. doylies
  2. Doylist
  3. Doylists
  4. doylum
  5. doylums
  6. doyly
  7. Doyne
  8. Doynes
  9. Doyon
  10. Doyong
  11. doyra

Source and license

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