Definition of "gay" in English

adjective

1. Homosexual:

2. Effeminate or flamboyant in behavior.

3. Used to express dislike: lame, uncool, stupid, burdensome, contemptible, generally bad.

   • This game is gay; let’s play a different one.
   • Dolph: "Oh, man! You kissed a girl!" Jimbo: "That is so gay!"

4. (dated) Happy, joyful, and lively.

   • The Gay Science

5. (dated) Quick, fast.

6. (dated) Festive, bright, or colourful.

   • Pennsylvania Dutch include the plain folk and the gay folk.

7. (obsolete) Sexually promiscuous (of any gender), (sometimes particularly) engaged in prostitution.

   • As our heroes passed along the Strand, they were accosted by a hundred gay ladies, who asked them if they were good-natured. "Devil take me!" exclaimed Echo, "if I know which way my ship heads; but there is not a girl in the Strand that I would touch with my gloves on."

8. (of a dog's tail) Upright or curved over the back.

9. (Scotland, Northern England, possibly obsolete) Considerable, great, large in number, size, or degree. In this sense, also in the variant gey.

   • A gay deal different to what I is noo.
   • There were a gay bit of lace on it.

noun

1. (now chiefly in the plural) A homosexual, especially a male homosexual.

2. (informal, often derogatory or ironic) Gayness: the quality of being gay.

   • Anti-gay persecution holds that you can pray the gay out of a person, or scare it out of them, or cajole it out of them.

3. (dialectal, obsolete) Something which is bright or colorful, such as a picture or a flower.

   • There's a good child; look at the gays, and keep quiet.

4. (obsolete) An ornament, a knick-knack.

   • If however the stranger be suspected of “sailing under false colours," when they are all in familiar chat about nothing in particular, “Cousin Jacky” will take occasion to say to the new chum, “My dear; ded 'e ever see a duck clunk a gay?" […] no more deceived by him than a duck can be made to clunk (swallow) a gay (fragment of broken crockery).

verb

1. (transitive, dated, uncommon) To make happy or cheerful.

2. (transitive, uncommon) To cause (something, e.g. AIDS) to be associated with homosexual people.

adverb

1. (Scotland, Northern England) Considerably, very.