mayday

nouncommon in dialogue

Australia//ˈmæɪ̯deɪ̯//
Australia/[ˈmæ̝ɪ̯dæ̝ɪ̯]/
//ˈmeɪ̯deɪ̯//
/[ˈmeɪ̯deɪ̯]/

An international distress signal used by shipping and aircraft.

noun

1
An international distress signal used by shipping and aircraft.
"Odd that she hasn't sent out a Mayday." "That is curious. Her radio must be disabled."

Etymology

From the distress signal mayday, from French m'aider, short for Venez m'aider! (“Come to help me!”). The term was conceived in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport in England. He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the term "mayday," the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aider.

Forms

plural: maydays

Maya · A member or descendant of various peoples: a flourishing…Mayan · Of or relating to the Maya people of Central America and…maybe · Perhaps, possibly.

mayday · An international distress signal used by shipping and aircraft.

Mayer · A surname from German.mayhem · The criminal offence of maiming a person by depriving them of…Maynard · A surname.

The neighbouring pages — Alphabetical 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.