Ploy

How to spell ploy

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ploy

What does ploy mean?

1. nounA cunning plan or action intended to gain an advantage, often by misleading or distracting someone.

Ploy in a sentence

• The discount was just a ploy to clear the old stock.

• Offering free coffee was a clever ploy to draw shoppers inside.

Where does ploy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Ploy began as a colloquial shortening of 'employ', which itself descends from the Latin implicare, literally 'to fold in' or 'to entangle', built from in 'in' and plicare 'to fold'. In eighteenth century Scottish and northern English speech, 'ploy' meant an occupation, an escapade, or a piece of business one was busy with, the things you might 'employ' yourself doing. From that idea of a pursuit or undertaking it drifted toward the notion of a calculated activity, and by the twentieth century it had settled into its modern sense of a clever stratagem or manoeuvre designed to gain an advantage. The same plicare 'to fold' root quietly survives in a crowd of English words such as 'imply', 'complicate', 'pliable', and 'deploy'. Because the word is so short, the trap is simply remembering the 'oy' ending rather than spelling it like the unrelated 'ploys' of folk-spellings; it rhymes neatly with 'joy' and 'toy'.

How the word is built

• ploy (a clipped form of 'employ', from Latin implicare 'to involve or entangle')