rye.
A grain used extensively in Europe for making bread, beer, and (now generally) for animal fodder.
Meaning & usage
A grain used extensively in Europe for making bread, beer, and (now generally) for animal fodder.
They bought a sack of rye and a sack of wheat with the intent to try their hand at milling and baking.
The grass Secale cereale from which the grain is obtained.
This field will be planted to rye next spring.
Ellipsis of rye bread.
Customer: A tuna sandwich, please. Waiter: Sure, hon. You want that on white, wheat, or rye?
Ellipsis of rye whiskey, whiskey made mainly or wholly from rye grain.
He likes any whiskey, but his favorite is rye.
A drink (serving) of rye whiskey.
I'll have a rye, neat, please.
Caraway (from the mistaken assumption that the whole seeds, often used to season rye bread, are the rye itself)
Ryegrass, any of the species of Lolium.
A disease of hawks.
A young man.
Where this word comes from
Inherited from Middle English rye, rie, from Old English ryġe, from Proto-West Germanic *rugi, from Proto-Germanic *rugiz. Germanic cognates include Dutch and West Frisian rogge, Low German Rogg, German Roggen, Rocken, Old Norse rugr (Danish rug, Swedish råg); non-Germanic cognates include Russian рожь (rožʹ) and Latvian rudzi.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.