clayey
Part of speech: adj
Morphological type: derivation
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.”
Base: clay
Affixes: -ey
Inflected forms:
form: clayier
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: clayiest
pos: adj
tags: superlative
Senses:
gloss: Composed of clay or containing (much) clay; clayish.
pos: adj
examples: 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.
gloss: Covered or dirtied with clay.
pos: adj
examples: Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless machinery will do it?
gloss: Resembling clay; claylike, clayish.
pos: adj
examples: Death, grim Death, will fold / Me, in his leaden Arms, and preſs me cloſe / To his cold clayie Breaſt: […]
gloss: Of the human body, as contrasted with the soul; bodily, human, mortal.
pos: adj
tags: figuratively
examples: This purifing of wit, this enritching of memory, enabling of iudgment, and enlarging of conceyt, which commonly we call learning, […] the final end is, to lead and draw vs to as high a perfection, as our degenerate ſoules made worſe by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.
[A]mid these tombs, / Cold as their clayey tenants, know, my heart / Must never grow to stone!
To low estate of clayey creature, / See, I bring the beggar's meed, / Nutriment beyond the need!
[W]hen between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if, darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.
Related words: clayed
clayishness
unclayed
Derived words: clayeyness
nonclayey
Translations: