vly
/vlaɪ/noun
vly is a noun meaning “A small swampy or marshy area, especially near a stream” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled V-L-Y, and it appears about once in every 42 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of vly is vlies.
What does vly mean?
noun
- 1
USA small swampy or marshy area, especially near a stream.
- 2
Alternative form of vlei.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce vly?
- US /vlaɪ/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of vly
- vlies plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is vly?
Vly appears about once in every 42 million words in written English, the 199,120th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does vly come from?
Attested chiefly as vly, rarely as vlaie or fly. From a dialectal form of Middle Dutch valeye, which meant "valley" in standard Dutch; a semantic shift to meaning "swamp" occurred either in Middle Dutch or independently in the speech of both the Dutch colonists of America and the Dutch colonists of South Africa (producing vlei).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).