dey

• (UK) IPA^(key): /deɪ/
• Rhymes: -eɪ
• Homophone: day

From Middle English deye, deie, daie, from Old English dǣġe (“maker of bread; baker; dairy-maid”), from Proto-Germanic *daigijǭ (“kneader of bread, maid”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeyǵʰ- (“to knead, form, build”). Cognate with Swedish deja, Icelandic deigja (“dairy-maid”); compare dairy, dough, lady.

• daie, deie, deye

dey (plural deys)

1. (Britain dialectal, Scotland) A servant who has charge of the dairy; a dairymaid.

From French dey, from Turkish dayı.

dey (plural deys)

1. The ruler of the Regency of Algiers (now Algeria) under the Ottoman Empire.
   • 1977, Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace, New York Review Books 2006, p. 29:

     the reigning Dey of Algiers (half of whose twenty-eight predecessors are said to have met violent ends) lost his temper with the French consul, struck him in the face with a fly-whisk, and called him ‘a wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal’.

dey

1. Eye dialect spelling of they, representing African American Vernacular English.
2. Eye dialect spelling of there, representing African American Vernacular English.

• dey in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• “dey” in Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001–2019.

• Dye, d'ye, dye, ye'd, yed

• IPA^(key): /teiː/
• Rhymes: -eiː

dey

1. inflection of deyja:
   1. first-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative

dey

1. Alternative form of day

dey

1. Alternative form of þei

• “thei (pron.)” in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 29 May 2018.

• deh

From English there.

dey

1. is, are