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.
Last month, Wynn-Williams sat silently on a stage at the Hay Festival, a prestigious literary and arts festival, as part of a panel on digital technology and public policy.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 25, 2026
Hay first reported the assaults to police in Largo, Fla., he has said.
From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 3, 2026
New Zealand-born Sarah Wynn-Williams was introduced as "an author in a hostage situation" at the Hay Festival, Powys, on Sunday.
From BBC • Jun. 1, 2026
Hay Festival chief executive Julie Finch praised Thompson's "intelligence, absolute wit, humour and fearless" storytelling.
From BBC • May 29, 2026
“And not even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace of them. I don’t think either summer or harvest, or winter moon, will ever shine on their revels more.”
From "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë
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.
