clayey
/ˈkleɪi/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 1.91 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Composed of clay or containing (much) clay; clayish.
adj
adj
Of the human body, as contrasted with the soul; bodily, human, mortal.
Example Sentences
- "The shores of the rivers and creeks are chiefly planted with coffee, to the distance of about 30 miles from the sea; thence 30 miles farther up, the soil becomes clayey and more fit for sugar[-]canes."
- "I was myself very successful in one beautiful group of insects, the tiger-beetles, which seem more abundant and varied here than anywhere else in the Archipelago. I first met with them on a cutting in the road, where a hard clayey bank was partially overgrown with mosses and small ferns."
- "She had walked over rotted, decaying, splintered planks covered with clayey soil: […]"
- "Limestone, of course, is calcium carbonate, and thus chemically utterly different in composition from the clayey rocks below and the hard, pebbly ones above."
- "Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless machinery will do it?"
- "Death, grim Death, will fold / Me, in his leaden Arms, and preſs me cloſe / To his cold clayie Breaſt: […]"
Etymology
From Middle English cleyy, cleyye (“clayish; messy; unclean”) [and other forms], either: * from Middle English clei, cley (“clay; clayey soil; clay-containing material used as mortar or plaster”) [and other forms] + -i (suffix forming adjectives); clei, cley is derived from Old English clǣġ (“clay”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *gleh₁y-, *gley- (“to smear; to stick; glue; putty”); or * from Old English clǣig (“clayey”), from clǣġ (“clay”) (see above) + -iġ (suffix forming adjectives). The English word is equivalent to clay + -ey (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘having the quality of’), with the -e- included to avoid the occurrence of -yy. Sense 4 (“of the human body, as contrasted with the soul”) may allude to the biblical account of God creating man from earth; see Genesis 2:7 (King James Version; spelling modernized): “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈkleɪi/
- British English: /ˈkleɪ(j)i/
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Geology.