Word.ws English Dictionary

rockabye

rockabye verb: to rock soothingly.

Verb

rockabye (third-person singular simple present rockabyes, present participle rockabyeing or rockabying, simple past and past participle rockabyed)

  1. (ambitransitive) To rock soothingly.
    • “We have a Chopin player in the house,” he said. And with a tiny smile he rockabyed the opening phrase of the Ballade and turned his head to look straight at Katie.1952, Isabella Holt, Rampole Place, Bobbs-Merrill Company, page 258
    • It was a pleasant day, the boat rockabyed in the slight chop and by late afternoon I was more nearly asleep than awake.1969, Harold F. Blaisdell, The Philosophical Fisherman, Houghton Mifflin Company, page 228

Noun

rockabye (plural rockabyes)

  1. A soothing rocking motion.
    • All the lullabies of the world suggest undulatory movements or rockabyes in the tree tops.1916, The Pedagogical Seminary, page 98
    • This is what Eve was thinking as she listened to the dance music swinging like a rockabye hammock hung between the silky strands of[…]1937, Pictorial Review

Examples of rockabye in a sentence

  • And lying down that night why should I hear the Brownsville trains that long had rockabyed me?1975, Modern Poetry Studies, page 136:
  • Poorly fit, it feels like grit or rockabyes out of the eyes.1985, David D. Michaels, Visual Optics and Refraction: A Clinical Approach, →ISBN, page 576:
  • She, I noticed, was smiling, but that baby in the treetop might well have smiled as the wind rockabyed her down.1992, Sonia Taitz, Mothering Heights: Reclaiming Motherhood from the Experts, William Morrow and Company, →ISBN, page 38:
  • Go to sleep, my darling boy, while mother rockabyes you with her tender hand.1995, Jewish Currents, page 18:

Forms of rockabye

Verb
third-person singular presentrockabyes
present participlerockabyeing
present participlerockabying
past participlerockabyed
pastrockabyed
Noun
pluralrockabyes

Origin of rockabye

From the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye Baby, previously recorded as "Hush-a-by(e) baby"; blend of rock + lullaby or rock + -abye (as in hush-a-bye, from -a- (connective interfix) + bye (“goodbye, bye-bye”)).

Questions about rockabye

What does rockabye mean?
Rockabye means to rock soothingly.
How do you use rockabye in a sentence?
And lying down that night why should I hear the Brownsville trains that long had rockabyed me?
What part of speech is rockabye?
Rockabye can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of rockabye?
The past tense of rockabye is rockabyed.

Words near rockabye in the dictionary

  1. rockabilly
  2. rockabillys
  3. rockable
  4. rockably
  5. rockaby
  6. rockabye
  7. rockabyed
  8. rockabyeing
  9. rockabyes
  10. rockabying
  11. rockabys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rockabye (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: “rockabye.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rockabye. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.