Guy

How to spell guy

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce guy

What does guy mean?

1. nounAn informal word for a man or fellow.
2. nounA rope or wire used to brace, steady, or secure something such as a tent or mast.

Guy in a sentence

• The guy at the front desk handed me my room key.

• They tightened each guy to stop the tent collapsing in the wind.

• A guy in a blue jacket asked for directions to the station.

• A steel guy held the radio mast steady during the storm.

Where does guy come from?

Language of origin: French

The everyday sense of guy meaning 'a man' grew directly out of a real person: Guy Fawkes, the conspirator caught trying to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. For generations afterwards the British burned a stuffed effigy on the fifth of November and called it a 'guy', and that grotesque figure gave the word a sense of 'a poorly dressed person', which softened over time into the friendly American use for any man or, in the plural, any group of people. The personal name Guy itself came into English through Old French, where Guy or Guido was a popular name of Germanic origin meaning roughly 'wood' or 'wide'. There is also a quite separate guy, the nautical and tent term for a rope or wire that steadies something, and that one was borrowed in the 1600s from Dutch or Low German gei, a line used to control a sail. The two words look identical and rhyme with 'high', but they reached English by completely different routes. Because the spelling is so short and regular, the main trap is simply remembering that it ends in a silent-style 'uy' rather than the more obvious 'i'.

How the word is built

• guy (a single root from the personal name Guy; no separable prefix or suffix)