clay
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "clay", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "clay" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "clay" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
clay is aEnglishnoun. It means: A mineral substance made up of small crystals of silica and alumina, that is ductile when moist; the material of pre-fired ceramics. Pronounced /kleɪ/. It ranks #4,358 in English word frequency. Often confused with cry and CPA.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | clay |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /kleɪ/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #4,358 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for clay is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kleɪ/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,358 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for clay, with forms such as "caly", "cclay", and "clayy". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "cry", "CPA", "CSA", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English cley, clay, from Old English clǣġ (“clay”), from Proto-West Germanic *klaij, from Proto-Germanic *klajjaz (“clay”), from Proto-Indo-European *gley- (“to glue, paste, stick together”). Cognate with Dutch klei (“clay”), Low German Klei (“c… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is clay, spelled C-L-A-Y, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A mineral substance made up of small crystals of silica and alumina, that is ductile when moist; the material of pre-fired ceramics.
- 2An earth material with ductile qualities.
- 3A tennis court surface made of crushed stone, brick, shale, or other unbound mineral aggregate.
- 4The material of the human body.
- 5A particle less than 3.9 microns in diameter, following the Wentworth scale.
- 6A clay pipe for smoking tobacco.
- 7A clay pigeon.
- 8Land or territory of a country or other political region, especially when subject to territorial claims.
- 9A moth, Mythimna ferrago
Etymology
From Middle English cley, clay, from Old English clǣġ (“clay”), from Proto-West Germanic *klaij, from Proto-Germanic *klajjaz (“clay”), from Proto-Indo-European *gley- (“to glue, paste, stick together”). Cognate with Dutch klei (“clay”), Low German Klei (“clay”), German Klei, Danish klæg (“clay”); compare Ancient Greek γλία (glía), Latin glūten (“glue”) (whence ultimately English glue), Russian глина (glina, “clay”). Related also to clag, clog.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: caly,cclay,clayy,cllay,clya,lcay
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for clay
Misspelling Variants of "clay"
Frequency rank: #4,358 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: