coly
noun
coly is a noun meaning “Any bird of either of the genera Colius or Urocolius, endemic to sub-Saharan Africa” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-O-L-Y, and it appears about once in every 49 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data, counting Coly, the name). The plural of coly is colies.
What does coly mean?
noun
- 1
Any bird of either of the genera Colius or Urocolius, endemic to sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of coly
- colies plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is coly?
Coly appears about once in every 49 million words in written English, the 217,360th most frequent word form in the list. The list counts every capitalisation together, so this includes Coly, the name.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does coly come from?
Learned borrowing from New Latin Colius.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).