clayey

adj

Etymology: From Middle English cleyy, cleyye (“clayish; messy; unclean”) [and other forms], either: * from Middle English clei, cley (“clay; clayey soil; clay-containing material used as mortar or plaster”) [and other forms] + -i (suffix forming adjectives); clei, cley is derived from Old English clǣġ (“clay”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *gleh₁y-, *gley- (“to smear; to stick; glue; putty”); or * from Old English clǣig (“clayey”), from clǣġ (“clay”) (see above) + -iġ (suffix forming adjectives). The English word is equivalent to clay + -ey (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘having the quality of’), with the -e- included to avoid the occurrence of -yy. Sense 4 (“of the human body, as contrasted with the soul”) may allude to the biblical account of God creating man from earth; see Genesis 2:7 (King James Version; spelling modernized): “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

1. Composed of clay or containing (much) clay; clayish.

   “The shores of the rivers and creeks are chiefly planted with coffee, to the distance of about 30 miles from the sea; thence 30 miles farther up, the soil becomes clayey and more fit for sugar[-]canes.”

   “I was myself very successful in one beautiful group of insects, the tiger-beetles, which seem more abundant and varied here than anywhere else in the Archipelago. I first met with them on a cutting in the road, where a hard clayey bank was partially overgrown with mosses and small ferns.”

2. Covered or dirtied with clay.

   “Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby;—unless machinery will do it?”

3. Resembling clay; claylike, clayish.

   “Death, grim Death, will fold / Me, in his leaden Arms, and preſs me cloſe / To his cold clayie Breaſt: […]”

4. Of the human body, as contrasted with the soul; bodily, human, mortal.

   “This purifing of wit, this enritching of memory, enabling of iudgment, and enlarging of conceyt, which commonly we call learning, […] the final end is, to lead and draw vs to as high a perfection, as our degenerate ſoules made worſe by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.”

   “[A]mid these tombs, / Cold as their clayey tenants, know, my heart / Must never grow to stone!”