Fly

How to spell fly

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fly

What does fly mean?

1. verbTo travel or move through the air, especially by means of wings or an aircraft.
2. nounA small flying insect with a single pair of wings, often found near food or waste.
3. nounThe flap of fabric covering the front fastening or zip of a pair of trousers.

Fly in a sentence

• verb

  The airline lets you fly direct to the coast each morning.

• noun

  A single fly kept landing on the picnic table.

• noun

  He realised his fly was undone halfway through the meeting.

• verb

  Swallows fly low across the field before a storm.

• noun

  She swatted the fly that had settled on the windowsill.

• noun

  The tailor replaced the broken zip on the fly of his suit.

Where does fly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Fly descends from the Old English verb fleogan, meaning literally 'to move through the air with wings', a word shared across the Germanic languages and related to the Old Norse fljuga and the German fliegen. The insect sense comes from the related Old English noun fleoge, which simply meant 'a flying creature', so the bug was named for the very thing it does. Over the centuries the verb gathered figurative uses, such as moving quickly or fleeing, while the noun branched into surprising directions: the flap of cloth covering buttons or a zip on trousers was called a 'fly' from the same idea of something that hangs loose and can be lifted, and a tent's outer cover took the name too. The spelling stayed short and blunt because the word is genuinely native English rather than a later borrowing. Its irregular past forms, flew and flown, are also inherited straight from the old Germanic conjugation.

How the word is built

• fly (single root, from Old English fleogan: to move through the air); no prefix or suffix