Skip to content
OneKitly

dye

nounverbnounattested in dialogue

  • //daɪ//

A colorant, especially one that has an affinity to the substrate to which it is applied.

noun

  1. 1

    A colorant, especially one that has an affinity to the substrate to which it is applied.

    While the yarn is soaking in its water and vinegar bath, I prepare a selection of dyes for my preferred colorway. Isolate each dye in its own jar and place it in the larger dyepot.

  2. 2

    Any hue or color.

Etymology

From Middle English deye, from Old English dēah, dēag (“color, hue, dye”), from Proto-West Germanic *daugu (“color, shade”), from *daugan (“to conceal, be dark”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰewh₂- (“to smoke, raise dust, camouflage”). Cognates Cognate with Old High German tougan (“dark, secretive”), tougal (“dark, hidden, covert”), Old English dēagol, dīegle (“dark, hidden, secret”), Old English dohs, dox (“dusky, dark”). See dusk.

verb

  1. 1

    To colour with dye, or as if with dye.

    You look different. Have you had your hair dyed?

    If indeed sharks were inclined to eat people, the world's oceans would be dyed crimson with the blood of millions.

    From there, customization simply becomes a matter of crafting trims at a smithing table, then dyeing them “using gems and ingots like diamonds, copper, and netherite.”

    I found this 4-500 Mesh Nylon Strainer Flour Sieve handy and budget-friendly, especially for those who dye often and want to keep solids out of their pots effortlessly.

Etymology

Fom Middle English deien, from Old English dēagian, from the noun.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of diearchaicArchaic spelling of die (“a cube used in games of chance”).

    The Superficies was compoſed of ſeveral bits of Wood, about the bigneſs of a Dye, but ſome larger than others.

    If a dye were marked with one figure or number of spots on four sides, and with another figure or number of spots on the two remaining sides, it would be more probable, that the former would turn up than the latter;

Forms

plural
dyes, dyce
past tense
dyed
past participle
dyed
present participle
dyeing, dying
third person singular
dyes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).