Other forms: dying, dyes, dyed, dyeing
To dye something is to change its colour by soaking it in coloured liquid. A packet of dye and a bucket for a faded black T-shirt, roots touched up at the kitchen sink, wool going into a pot of onion skins.
The noun is the same word: the dye, a fabric dye, food dye stirred into icing. The spelling is the trap, because dyeing keeps its e, while dying is what happens at the end of a life, and 'died' and 'dyed' sound identical. You dye hair, cloth, eggs and wool; you paint walls and you stain wood. Dyed-in-the-wool means committed past changing, from wool coloured before it is spun so that the colour goes all the way through. And the pattern is dye something a colour: she dyed it blue, not 'dyed it to blue'.
1verbdyeTo change the colour of hair, cloth or other material by soaking it in coloured liquid.
“She dyed the curtains dark green to hide the stains.”
2nountintA substance used to colour hair, cloth or food.
“The dye left blue rings around the bath.”
dye is a colouring substance.
Dye is Old English dēag, 'colour, hue, dye', and behind it sits a Proto-West Germanic word for colour or shade built on a verb meaning to conceal, to be dark. The root is Proto-Indo-European *dʰewh₂-, about smoke, raised dust and camouflage. Dusk belongs to the same family, so colour began, for our ancestors, as a kind of darkening.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰewh₂- — to smoke, raise dust, camouflage
Proto-West Germanic
*daugu — color, shade
Old English
dēah
Middle English
deye
English, today
dye
Built from
From Middle English deye, from Old English dēah, dēag (“color, hue, dye”), from Proto-West Germanic daugu (“color, shade”), from daugan (“to conceal, be dark”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰewh₂- (“to smoke, raise dust, camouflage”). 2 Cognate with Old High German tougan (“dark, secretive”), tougal (“dark, hidden, covert”), Old English dēagol, dīegle (“dark, hidden, secret”), Old English dohs, dox (“dusky, dark”). See dusk.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA