Clayey

//ˈkleɪ(j)i// adj

adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Composed of clay or containing (much) clay; clayish.

    "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."

  2. 2
    Covered or dirtied with clay.

    "Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless machinery will do it?"

  3. 3
    Resembling clay; claylike, clayish.

    "Death, grim Death, will fold / Me, in his leaden Arms, and preſs me cloſe / To his cold clayie Breaſt: […]"

  4. 4
    Of the human body, as contrasted with the soul; bodily, human, mortal. figuratively

    "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."

Adjective
  1. 1
    resembling or containing clay wordnet
  2. 2
    (used of soil) compact and fine-grained wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
argillaceousadobeargillaceousargillaceousargillousbolar

Example

More examples

"There were many marks of footsteps upon the wet clayey soil; but since the police had been coming and going over it, I was unable to see how my companion could hope to learn anything from it."

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.”

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.