Skip to main content

Tray or trey?

tray is a noun meaning “A small, typically rectangular or round, flat, and rigid object upon which…”; trey is a noun meaning “A playing card or die with the rank of three”. They sound the same (/tɹeɪ/). In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) tray is about 2.1 times as common as trey.

trayortrey

What is the difference between tray and trey?

traytrey
Part of speechnoun, verbnoun
Meaning

A small, typically rectangular or round, flat, and rigid object upon which things are carried

The items on a full tray

to place (items) on a tray

A playing card or die with the rank of three

A score of three in cards, dice, or dominoes

ExampleI carefully arranged the dishes on the tray and brought it upstairsnone recorded
Formstraystreys
Pronunciation/tɹeɪ//tɹeɪ/
In writing5.6 times per million words2.7 times per million words

Sources: tray and trey in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Every current meaning of tray and trey

tray

  1. 1

    noun A small, typically rectangular or round, flat, and rigid object upon which things are carried

    I carefully arranged the dishes on the tray and brought it upstairs

  2. 2

    verb to place (items) on a tray

    Be sure to tray eggs with the large end up

  3. 3

    noun Alternative form of trey (“third branch of deer's antler”)

  4. 4

    noun A gay trans person, particularly a man (a man who is both transgender and gay)

  5. 5

    noun The items on a full tray

    Before long they had consumed a whole tray of shrimp cocktails and sent for another

  6. 6

    verb to slide down a snow-covered hill on a tray from a cafeteria

    Traying has provided collegiate fun and the occasional fatality for decades

  7. 7

    noun A component of a device into which an item is placed for use in the device's operations

    The CD tray will not open

  8. 8

    noun informalA notification area used for icons and alerts

trey

  1. 1

    noun A playing card or die with the rank of three

  2. 2

    noun A score of three in cards, dice, or dominoes

  3. 3

    noun AustraliainformalA three penny coin; a thrippence

  4. 4

    noun informalThe third bearer of the same personal name in a family, often denoted by suffixed Roman numeral III

  5. 5

    noun The third branch of a deer's antler

Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.

Which is more common, tray or trey?

tray appears 5.6 times per million words; trey 2.7 times per million words.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How many people search tray vs trey?

“tray vs trey” is searched about 210 times a month on Google and 30 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“trey vs tray”, “tray or trey”).

Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.

The words