Word.ws English Dictionary

parleying

parleying is the present participle and gerund of parley.

Meaning of parley

Verb

parley (third-person singular simple present parleys, present participle parleying, simple past and past participle parleyed)

  1. (intransitive) To have a discussion, especially one between enemies.
    • [...] at day break we found the villaine, who, loath to parlee in fire and ſhot, fled amaine and left us [...]1638, Sir Thomas Herbert, Some years travels into divers parts of Asia and Afrique

See all 3 meanings of parley

Noun

parleying (countable and uncountable, plural parleyings)

  1. The act of one who parleys.
    • Those things […] about which he was wont to have long parleyings and disputings with his own conscience — employing carnal reason to invent arguments and pleas of excuse — he now sticks at no longer […]a. 1758, Jonathan Edwards, Pressing Into The Kingdom of God
    • He and Colonel Rotton, who was also Chairman for a period, could generally make the lads on arrival understand them without much parleying.1907, George Haw, “A Bad Boys’ Advocate”, in From Workhouse to Westminster: The Life Story of Will Crooks, M.P., London; Paris; New York, N.Y.; Melbourne, Vic.: Cassell and Company, Limited, page 141

Forms of parleying

pluralparleyings

Questions about parleying

What does parleying mean?
Parleying means the act of one who parleys.
What is parleying the present participle and gerund of?
Parleying is the present participle and gerund of parley.
What part of speech is parleying?
Parleying is a noun.
What is the plural of parleying?
The plural of parleying is parleyings.

Words near parleying in the dictionary

  1. parley-voos
  2. parley-vous
  3. parleyed
  4. parleyer
  5. parleyers
  6. parleying
  7. parleyings
  8. parleys
  9. parleyvoo
  10. parleyvooed
  11. parleyvooing

Source and license

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