nay

adv

1. (archaic, dialectal, not-comparable)No.

   “Duke Magnus, Duke Magnus, plight thee to me, I pray you still so freely; Say me not nay, but yes, yes!”

2. (archaic, dialectal, not-comparable)Introducing a statement, without direct negation.

   “Nay, what are you smiling at so damnably?”

3. (archaic, not-comparable)Or rather, or should I say; moreover (introducing a stronger and more appropriate expression than the preceding one).

   “His face was dirty, nay, filthy.”

   “[…] And proved not only horse, but cows, / Nay pigs, were of the elder house: / For beasts, when man was but a piece / Of earth himself, did th' earth possess.”

   “And even in our wildest and most wandering reveries, nay in our very dreams, we shall find, if we reflect, that the imagination ran not altogether at adventures,”

   “And all rejected: Has this course been used? Arch. We grant it has not; but— King. Nay, give me leave,— I urge, from your own grant, it has not been. If then, in process of a petty sum, Both parties having not been fully heard,[…]”

   “Earnestly bent upon fulfilling the weighty, nay solemn, responsibilities of his office at all hazard, even at the risk of so far neglecting his parliamentary duties as to appear upon the division-list less frequently than any of his colleagues, Sir John Pakington wore the wooden spoon at the whitebait dinner, though with an air of waggery — almost as a decoration.”

intj

1. (archaic)No.

noun

1. A vote against.

   “I vote nay, even though the motion is popular, because I would rather be right than popular.”

   “Recently senators could fax in their yeas or nays to the committee chairman.”

2. A person who voted against.

   “The vote is 4 in favor and 20 opposed; the nays have it.”

3. (archaic)A denial; a refusal.

   “And my povert' no wight nor can nor may Make comparison, it is no nay.”

verb

1. (obsolete)To refuse.

   “the cardinall then being bishop of Winchester, tooke vpon him the state of cardinall, which was naied and denaied him, by the king of most noble memorie”

adj

1. (not-comparable, obsolete)Nary; not any

   “'Tis easy to do this experiment, though nay substance will do: we shall need a special one.”

   “Nay man could have come out of such a situation unscathed.”

   “nay other Nations [beyond the Native American ones] seem to have continued in a State of Barbarism, as long as they continued to exercise one only of these Arts [Metallurgy and Agriculture] without the other;”

   “His house was so closely beset by the populace, day and night, that scarcely nay person ventured to visit him; and he was afraid that his chapel would be burned to the ground.”

name

1. (abbreviation, alt-of)Abbreviation of Nayarit: a state of Mexico.
2. A surname.