Talk:at bay

Wiktionary:Requests for verification - kept

Kept. See archived discussion of October 2007. 14:34, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes spelled bey - why?

I've seen capable writers writing this expression as "at bey". Anyone able to expand the entry by saying something about this?

Here are some examples, clearly too numerous to be typos:

• "keep him at bey"
• "kept at bey"
• "keep it at bey"

I already posted this to Talk:bey, but this is probably the more appropriate place since the entry for bey is currently completely unrelated. --Gronky (talk) 05:42, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

English spelling provides many opportunities for making mistakes by picking the wrong analogy for spelling. The "bey" spelling is like obey, for example. The connection between baying ("the sound of hunting dogs") and the modern uses of at bay is not obvious to folks unfamiliar with such dogs and such activity, so, someone who, not having read widely, has not seen "at bay" in print might figure that, as the familiar meanings of bay are unrelated to what is being expressed, he would look elsewhere for a spelling model. "Bey" makes it past spell-checkers that ignore context because it does exist. DCDuring TALK 11:23, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Ok, that sounds possible alright. I'll keep an eye out for an example of this spelling by a decent author.

So it's about dogs? Can you add a line to the entry? I'd assumed it was about ships. Gronky (talk) 07:04, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, see (deprecated template usage) bay, Etymology 4. Ƿidsiþ 07:13, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Great. If you're sure, can someone add something to at bay about this? --Gronky (talk) 10:46, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

The quotations both show the usage with dogs. Explaining how multiword expressions get their meaning from component terms that have multiple meanings is something we don't usually do unless the need is obvious. We might need to have the original literal usage as an additional definition. DCDuring TALK 15:07, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

contranyms

The two meanings are contranyms --Backinstadiums (talk) 10:31, 28 February 2020 (UTC)