tay
/teɪ/
tay noun: tea.
Noun
tay (plural tays)
- Tea.
- Well, ma'am, you see it was whin I was jist about the age of Mary, there. I was comin' home late one Monday evenin' from the market; for my aunt Kitty, God be marciful to her! would keep me to take a cup of tay.1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 381
- "[T]hen the Tulip, - ah! didn't the Tulip die hard, - he fout hard for it, even after he had a hole in his head as big as a tay cup."1856 October 18, The People's Advocate and New South Wales Vindicator, Sydney, page 6, column 1
Proper noun (1) capitalized: Tay
Tay
- The longest river in Scotland, United Kingdom, originating on the slopes of Ben Lui and flowing eastwards through the city of Perth before becoming an estuary, the Firth of Tay.
- A Metro-Cammell diesel multiple-unit from Dundee approaches Perth on the single-line bridge over the Tay in July, 1961.1962 October, G. Freeman Allen, “The New Look in Scotland's Northern Division—II”, in Modern Railways, page 269, photo caption
- A river in Lanark County, Ontario, Canada, a left tributary of the Rideau.
- A township in Simcoe County, Ontario, Canada.
Proper noun (2) capitalized: Tay
Tay (countable and uncountable, plural Tays)
- A surname.
Proper noun (3) capitalized: Tay
Tay (countable and uncountable, plural Tays)
- A diminutive of the unisex given name Taylor.
tay meaning in Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati and Nepali
tay in Gujarati
- ટેય
tay in Nepali
- टेय
Forms of tay
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | tays |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Tays |
Origin of tay
Spelling form indicating original pronunciation of tea. The digraph ea represented /ɛː/ in Early Modern English; it later merged chiefly with ee, but regionally or sporadically with ay (in standard English break, great, steak). Compare the song Polly put the kettle on, where tea rhymes with away.
Possibly from Proto-Brythonic Tausa (“silent, strong, or flowing”).
Borrowed from Hokkien 鄭／郑 (Tēⁿ), Teochew 鄭／郑 (dên7), Hokkien 戴 (Tè), or a variant of the English surname Tee.
Words formed from tay
Words that rhyme with tay
Questions about tay
- What does tay mean?
- Tay means tea.
- What is tay in Telugu?
- Tay in Telugu is టే. See Tay meaning in Telugu.
- What part of speech is tay?
- Tay can be a noun or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce tay?
- Tay is pronounced /teɪ/.
- What is the plural of tay?
- The plural of tay is tays.
Words near tay in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tay (page history and authors); Tay (page history and authors); tay (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); tay (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); tay (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); tay (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tay.wav.
Cite this entry: “tay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.