Word.ws English Dictionary

imploy

imploy is the obsolete spelling of employ.

imploy is the obsolete spelling of imply.

Meaning of employ

Verb

employ (third-person singular simple present employs, present participle employing, simple past and past participle employed)

  1. To retain (someone) as an employee.
    • Our company employs hundreds of people.
  2. (rare) To provide (someone) with a new job; to hire.
    • Yesterday our local garage employed a new mechanic.
  3. To use (someone or something) for a job or task.
    • The burglar employed a jemmy to get in.
    Synonyms:
    apply, use, utilize
  4. To make busy; to preoccupy.
    • Let it not enter in your minde of loue: / Be merry, and imploy your chiefeſt thoughts / To courtſhip, and ſuch faire oſtents of loue / As ſhall conueniently become you there;c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
    Synonyms:
    occupy, busy

See all 7 meanings of employ

Meaning of imply

Verb

imply (third-person singular simple present implies, present participle implying, simple past and past participle implied)

  1. (transitive) To have as a necessary consequence; to lead to (something) as a consequence.
    • Correlation does not imply causation
    Synonyms:
    entail, implicate, import
  2. (transitive) To suggest by logical inference.
    • When I state that your dog is brown, I am not implying that all dogs are brown.
  3. (transitive) To hint; to insinuate; to suggest tacitly and avoid a direct statement.
    • What do you mean "we need to be more careful with hygiene"? Are you implying that I don't wash my hands?
  4. (archaic) To enfold, entangle.
    • And in his bosome secretly there lay / An hatefull Snake, the which his taile vptyes / In many folds, and mortall sting implyes.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

See all 5 meanings of imply

Forms of imploy

third-person singular presentimploys
present participleimploying
past participleimployed
pastimployed

Questions about imploy

What is imploy the obsolete spelling of?
Imploy is the obsolete spelling of employ.

Words near imploy in the dictionary

  1. implosions
  2. implosive
  3. implosively
  4. implosiveness
  5. implosives
  6. imploy
  7. imployed
  8. imploying
  9. imployment
  10. imployments
  11. imploys

Source and license

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