grass, clover, alfalfa, etc., cut and dried for use as forage.
grass mowed or intended for mowing.
Slang.
a small sum of money.
Twenty dollars an hour for doing very little certainly ain't hay.
money.
A thousand dollars for a day's work is a lot of hay!
Slang. marijuana.
to convert (plant material) into hay.
to furnish (horses, cows, etc.) with hay.
make hay of, to scatter in disorder; render ineffectual.
The destruction of the manuscript made hay of two years of painstaking labor.
make hay while the sun shines, to seize an opportunity when it presents itself: Also make hay.
If you want to be a millionaire, you have to make hay while the sun shines.
in the hay, in bed; retired, especially for the night.
By ten o'clock he's in the hay.
hit the hay, to go to bed.
It got to be past midnight before anyone thought of hitting the hay.
a roll in the hay, sexual intercourse.
John Milton, 1838–1905, U.S. statesman and author.
a river in NW Canada, flowing NE to the Great Slave Lake. 530 miles (853 km) long.
grass, clover, etc, cut and dried as fodder
( in combination )
a hayfield
a hayloft
slang to go to bed
to throw into confusion
to take full advantage of an opportunity
informal sexual intercourse or heavy petting
to cut, dry, and store (grass, clover, etc) as fodder
(tr) to feed with hay
a circular figure in country dancing
a former country dance in which the dancers wove in and out of a circle
before 900; Middle English; Old English hēg; cognate with German Heu, Old Norse hey, Gothic hawi. See hew
Hay is a type of dried grass that's fed to certain farm animals. You might buy bags of hay to feed your pet rabbit, who likes to nibble on it. Hay is a mixture of grassy plants grown in fields, cut or mown, bundled in bales, and stored until ready to be fed to livestock. Hay and straw aren't the same thing; hay is cut when it's green, while straw is made up of the leftover dried stems and leaves of plants that have been harvested. And while some animals feed on straw too, hay is more nutritious. The Old English root is heg, "grass cut or mown."
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
That’s what I was thinking as I positioned myself in front of bales of hay in an open field at the Woodley Park Archery Range in Van Nuys.
From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 30, 2026
The 41-year-old Vance makes great hay out of his relative youth on Capitol Hill, right up to bragging as often as possible about his pregnant wife.
From Salon • Jun. 15, 2026
Unfortunately for hay fever sufferers, pollen levels are likely to rise as the increasing temperatures come in the wake of wet weather.
From BBC • Jun. 14, 2026
A tractor and hay bales served as a backdrop.
From Barron's • Jun. 7, 2026
Yellowish-green strands of hay were hanging out of its mouth as it chewed.
From "Pony Problems: Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew, #3" by Carolyn Keene
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
