ply
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /plaɪ/
rhymes: -aɪ
Forms: form: ply
form: plies
form: plys
Etymology: From Middle English pleit, plit, plite (“a fold, pleat, wrinkle; braid, strand in a braided cord, ply”), from Anglo-Norman pli, plei, pleit, and Middle French pli, ploy, ply (“a fold, pleat; joint in armour; situation, state”) (modern French pli (“a fold, pleat”)), from plier, ployer (“to bend, fold”), from plicāre (“to bend, fold, roll up”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleḱ- (“to fold, plait, weave”).
Senses: examples: text: two-ply toilet paper
text: It is possible to have a very well load balanced partition but with such a high ply that its slowest piece is slower than a not-so-well balanced partition with less ply.
ref: 1999, Twelfth International Conference on VLSI Design: Proceedings: January 7–10, 1999, Goa, India, Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, →ISBN, page 313:
text: The designer critic's staff would come in with, for example, loads of three-ply cashmere. The students weren't even selecting their own fabrics.
ref: 2015 October, Tim Gunn, with Ada Calhoun, “Repositioning the Parsons Fashion Design Program”, in Tim Gunn: The Natty Professor: A Master Class on Mentoring, Motivating, and Making it Work!, trade paperback edition, New York, N.Y.: Gallery Books, →ISBN, part I (Truth Telling), page 49:
glosses: A layer of material.
examples: text: To make the hail rod a rope of straw is the first thing necessary; it must be made of ripe wheat straw, soaked and twisted, plaited with three strand and then with four ply, making twelve strand to the rope.
ref: 1837 August, “Art I. Protection against Hail Storms. Notice and Description of the Paragrèle, or Hail Rod. By A. J. Downing, Botanic Garden and Nurseries, Newbergh, N.Y.”, in C. M. Hovey, editor, The Magazine of Horticulture, Botany, and All Useful Discoveries and Improvements in Rural Affairs, volume III, number VIII (number XXXII overall), Boston, Mass.: Published by Hovey & Co., […]; New York, N.Y.: Israel Post, […], →OCLC, page 281:
glosses: A strand that, twisted together with other strands, makes up rope or yarn.
examples: text: The compartment ceiling panels are of plastic material backed with ply or hardboard panels.
ref: 1951 May, “British Railway Standard Coaches”, in Railway Magazine, page 328:
text: The Standards describe the quality of timber or ply, moisture content, amount of acceptable sapwood, freedom from decay and insect attack, limitation of checks and splits and treatment of resin staining, and the way plugging may be employed to mask defects in ply faces.
ref: 1994, Alan Blanc, “Doors”, in Mitchell’s Internal Components (Mitchell’s Building Series), Essex: Longman Scientific & Technical, →ISBN; republished London: Routledge, 2014, →ISBN, section 6.5 (Flush Doors):
text: Teak-faced ply is about three times the price of any other, so if you need to economise, anything other than teak would be a good choice! Similarly, marine ply is substantially more expensive than exterior ply, so it may be preferable to go with the latter option.
ref: 2015, “Hull and Deck”, in Judith Chamberlain-Webber, editor, The Boat Improvement Bible: Practical Projects to Customise and Upgrade Your Boat, London: Adlard Coles Nautical, →ISBN, page 39, column 1:
glosses: Clipping of plywood.
examples: text: He proposed to build Deep Purple, a super-computer capable of 24-ply look-ahead for chess.
text: Chinook uses an iterative, alpha-beta search with transposition tables and the history heuristic[…]. Under tournament conditions (thirty moves an hour), the program searches to an average minimum depth of nineteen ply (one ply is one move by one player). The search uses selective deepening to extend lines that are tactically or positionally interesting. Consequently, major lines of play are often searched many plies deeper. It is not uncommon for the program to produce analyses that are thirty-ply deep or more.
ref: 1996, Jonathan Schaeffer, Robert Lake, “Solving the Game of Checkers”, in Richard J. Nowakowski, editor, Games of No Chance: Combinatorial Games at MSRI, 1994 (Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Publications; 29), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 122:
text: Two principal search strategies were (correctly) predicted: Type-A programs that apply "brute force" inspection of every possible position over a fixed number of plys; and Type-B programs that prune potential moves according to some selection function and then examine the significant sets over as many plys as practical and only at those positions reflecting a degree of stability.
ref: 2009, Richard A. Epstein, “Games of Pure Skill and Competitive Computers”, in The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, 2nd edition, Burlington, Mass.: Academic Press, →ISBN; special edition, Waltham, Mass.; Kidlington, Oxfordshire: Academic Press, 2013, →ISBN, page 380:
qualifier: artificial intelligence; combinatorial game theory; artificial intelligence; combinatorial game theory
glosses: In two-player sequential games, a "half-turn" or a move made by one of the players.
examples: text: You may be ſure, in the ply I was now taking, I had no objection to the propoſal, and was rather a tiptoe for its accompliſhment.
ref: 1749, [John Cleland], “(Please specify the letter or volume)”, in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [Fanny Hill], London: […] [Thomas Parker] for G. Fenton [i.e., Fenton and Ralph Griffiths] […], →OCLC, page 75:
english: Fanny Hill
translation: Fanny Hill
glosses: A condition, a state.
Derived terms: bias-ply
cross-ply
manyplies
multi-ply
plyboard
plyscraper
plywood
single-ply membrane
single-ply roof
three-ply
two-ply