Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A cereal grass (Secale cereale) of cool climates, widely cultivated for its grain.
  • noun The grain of this plant, ground into flour or used in making whiskey and for livestock feed.
  • noun Rye bread.
  • noun Whiskey made from the grains of this plant.
  • noun A Romani man.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A gentleman; a superior person: as, a Rommany rye.
  • noun The cereal plant Sccale cerealc, or its seeds.
  • noun In heraldry, a bearing representing a stalk of grain with the ear bending downward, thus distinguished from wheat, in which the ear is erect.
  • noun Whisky made from rye. [Colloq., U. S.]
  • noun A disease in hawks which causes the head to swell.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) A grain yielded by a hardy cereal grass (Secale cereale), closely allied to wheat; also, the plant itself. Rye constitutes a large portion of the breadstuff used by man.
  • noun A disease in a hawk.
  • noun (Bot.) See under Grass. See also Ray grass, and Darnel.
  • noun (Bot.) any plant of the genus Elymus, tall grasses with much the appearance of rye.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Caraway (from the mistaken assumption that the whole seeds, often used to season rye bread, are the rye itself)
  • noun Ryegrass, any of the species of Lolium.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun whiskey distilled from rye or rye and malt
  • noun hardy annual cereal grass widely cultivated in northern Europe where its grain is the chief ingredient of black bread and in North America for forage and soil improvement
  • noun the seed of the cereal grass

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English ryge.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Romani rai, from Sanskrit rājā, king; see raja.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English ryġe, from Proto-Germanic *rugiz. Cognates include Germanic Old Norse rugr (Danish rug, Swedish råg), German Roggen and from non-Germanic Indo-European Russian рожь (rož') and Old Prussian rugis.

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