Dye

How to spell dye

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dye

What does dye mean?

1. verbTo change the colour of fabric, hair, or another material by soaking it in a coloured solution.
2. nounA coloured substance used to change the colour of cloth, hair, or other material.

Dye in a sentence

• verb

  She decided to dye the faded curtains a deeper blue.

• noun

  The red dye stained her fingers for days.

• verb

  Many people dye their grey hair to look younger.

• noun

  Natural dye can be made from plants and berries.

Where does dye come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Dye comes from the Old English noun deag, meaning a colour, hue, or tint, with a related verb deagian, 'to colour something'. This places it firmly among the native Germanic vocabulary of English rather than the later Latin and French borrowings. For centuries the word was spelled in many ways, and the 'ie' versus 'ye' question was genuinely unsettled. By the eighteenth century writers deliberately fixed the spelling as 'dye' precisely to keep it distinct in writing from its exact homophone 'die', the word for ceasing to live; this useful split is why the two are spelled differently today even though they sound identical. The retained 'e' before adding endings (dyeing, not dying) preserves that same distinction, and that is the spelling trap modern adults most often stumble over.

How the word is built

• dye (single root from Old English deah/deag: a colour or tint), with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like dye

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• die: To stop living; to cease to be alive.