Deploy

How to spell deploy

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce deploy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deploy mean?

1. verbTo position or bring resources, people, or equipment into effective action.

Deploy in a sentence

• The company plans to deploy extra staff during the holiday rush.

• Engineers will deploy the new software across every office next week.

Where does deploy come from?

Language of origin: French

Deploy traces back to the Latin verb displicare, built from dis- meaning 'apart' and plicare meaning 'to fold', so the literal sense was to unfold or spread something out. French turned this into deployer, which kept the idea of opening out a folded thing, and military commanders adopted it for spreading troops from a tight column into a wide battle line. English borrowed the word in the early 1700s, mainly as a term of warfare, and only later widened it to cover the orderly placing of resources, staff, equipment, and, in modern usage, software. The same plicare root that means 'fold' also gives us 'reply', 'employ', 'complicate', and 'pliable', which is a useful reminder that the spelling ends in -ploy, not -ploi. Because the word arrived through French, the stress sits on that final 'ploy', the part that carries the original folding sense.

How the word is built

• de- (apart, un-)
• ploy (from Latin plicare: to fold)