Stray

How to spell stray

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stray

What does stray mean?

1. verbTo wander away from a fixed course, group, or proper place.
2. adjectiveSeparated from where it belongs, or occurring randomly and out of place.
3. nounA domestic animal that has wandered off and has no apparent owner.

Stray in a sentence

• verb

  The hikers were warned not to stray from the marked trail.

• adjective

  A stray hair kept falling across her forehead during the interview.

• noun

  They adopted a stray that had been living behind the supermarket.

• verb

  His attention began to stray during the long afternoon meeting.

• adjective

  The accountant tracked down a stray figure that had thrown off the total.

• noun

  The shelter takes in every stray brought through its doors.

Where does stray come from?

Language of origin: French

Stray came into English in the 1200s through Anglo-French and Old French, where the verb estraier meant 'to wander about loose' or 'to roam without an owner', typically used of animals that had broken away from a herd or flock. That Old French word is generally traced back to an unrecorded Vulgar Latin form, often reconstructed as estradiare, built on the Latin strata, the 'paved road' (the same source that gives us 'street'); the underlying image is of a beast that has left the proper road and gone roaming. The noun 'estray', a domestic animal found wandering with no apparent owner, was a real legal term in medieval English law, and our shorter 'stray' is simply a clipped form of it. Over time the meaning broadened from straying livestock to anything that drifts off course, both physically (a path, a bullet, a thought) and figuratively (wandering from a topic or from moral conduct). Because the word ends in the open '-ay' sound, the only mild trap is remembering it is spelled 'ay' rather than the rarer 'eigh' patterns seen in some homophones.

How the word is built

• stray (a single root from Old French estraier 'to wander loose'; no prefix or suffix in modern English)