clayey
Meanings
Adjective
- resembling or containing clay
Adjective Satellite
- (used of soil) compact and fine-grained
- "the clayey soil was heavy and easily saturated"
Adj
- Composed of clay or containing (much) clay; clayish.
- Covered or dirtied with clay.
- Resembling clay; claylike, clayish.
- Of the human body, as contrasted with the soul; bodily, human, mortal.
Origin / 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.”
Synonyms
Antonyms
Scrabble Score: 14
clayey is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordclayey is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
clayey is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary