Word of the Day:
waylay
What It Means
To lie in wait for and attack from ambush.
Waylay in Context
“I, their host, often waylay them and try to commune with them; but always they glide past me. And how gracefully they glide, these ghosts! It is a pleasure to watch them. It is a lesson in deportment. May they never be laid! Of all my household-pets, they are the dearest to me.”
Did You Know?
From way + lay, likely a calque of Middle Dutch wegelagen (“besetting of ways, lying in wait with evil or hostile intent along public ways”). Compare Middle Low German wegelagen, German wegelagern (“to waylay; rob”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: waylay (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “waylay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/waylay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
