Pray

How to spell pray

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pray

What does pray mean?

1. verbTo address a god or other higher power with worship, thanks, or a request; or to ask earnestly for something.

Pray in a sentence

• Every evening she would kneel and pray for her family.

• The stranded climbers could only pray for clear weather.

Where does pray come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin precari, meaning 'to ask earnestly' or 'to beg', which was built on the noun prex, prec- meaning 'a request' or 'an entreaty'. It travelled into English through Old French preier (modern French prier), arriving in the 1200s with the religious sense of addressing a god or saint with a request. The same prec- root sits inside relatives like 'precarious', which originally described something held only through prayer or by another's favour, and 'deprecate', literally to pray something away. The everyday softer use, as in 'I pray you tell me', once a polite way of begging a favour, faded into the archaic 'prithee'. The spelling trap is the homophone 'prey'; pray with the -ay ending always means to make an appeal or to worship, never to hunt or be hunted.

How the word is built

• pray (from Latin precari: to ask, beg)
• no affix; a single root verb

Words that sound like pray

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

• prey: An animal hunted or killed by another for food.