Word.ws English Dictionary

relied

relied is the simple past and past participle of rely.

Meaning of rely

Verb

rely (third-person singular simple present relies, present participle relying, simple past and past participle relied)

  1. (intransitive, with on or upon, formerly also with in) To trust; to have confidence in.
    • I relied on "George" and "Fred"—the autopilot and the flight director—to fly the airplane while I worked my way through […]1993, Flying, volume 120, page 73
  2. (intransitive, with on or upon) To depend; to be dependent upon.
    • The city relies on the subway system.
  3. (intransitive, with on or upon) To be intellectually contingent from; to stem from.
    • Parts I and IV of the Court's opinion, and Part III except insofar as it relies upon legislative history1989, Antonin Scalia, Jett v. Dallas Independent School District
  4. (obsolete, transitive) To fasten, fix, attach
    • Therefore [they] must needs relye their faithe upon the sillie Ministers faithlesse fidelitie.
  5. (obsolete, transitive) To bring together again; to rally.
    • Petrius, that was a noble knyght, and bolde and hardy, relied his peple a-boute hym,

Forms of relied

alternative formrelyed

Phrases with relied

Questions about relied

What is relied the simple past and past participle of?
Relied is the simple past and past participle of rely.

Words near relied in the dictionary

  1. reliction
  2. relictions
  3. relicts
  4. relictual
  5. relictualism
  6. relied
  7. relied on
  8. relied upon
  9. relief
  10. relief agencies
  11. relief agency

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: relied (page history and authors); rely (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: en-us-relied.ogg.

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