Other forms: obeyed, obeying, obeys
To obey is to do exactly what a rule or a person tells you. Obey the law, obey orders, the dog obeys nobody.
It takes a direct object with no preposition: obey the rules, not obey to the rules. It sounds strong and slightly old-fashioned about people — follow instructions is the everyday phrase — but it is standard about laws, orders and animals. Note obedient and obedience, and disobey; and that obey has largely disappeared from marriage vows, which is one of the clearest social changes visible in a single word.
1verbobeyTo do exactly what a rule or a person tells you.
“He obeyed the instruction and it was the wrong one.”
synonyms: comply with, follow
obey is a way of complying.
Latin oboedire is ob-, towards, plus audire, to hear — to listen towards somebody. Obedience is built on hearing, which is why the same idea appears in audience, audit and audible.
Latin
oboediō
Old French
obeir
Anglo-Norman
obeir
Middle English
obeyen
English, today
obey
Built from
From Middle English obeyen, from Anglo-Norman obeir, obeier et al., Old French obeir, from Latin oboediō (also obēdiō (“to listen to, harken, usually in extended sense, obey, be subject to, serve”)), from ob- (“before, near”) + audiō (“to hear”). Compare audient. In Latin, ob + audire would have been expected to become Classical Latin *obūdiō (compare in + claudō becoming inclūdō), but it has been theorized that the usual law court associations of the word for obeying encouraged a false archaism from ū to oe, to oboediō (compare Old Latin oinos → Classical Latin ūnus).page 220, The Latin Language by L.R.Palmer (080612136X, 9780806121369), and [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=O7z4Sl-SgFEC&pg=PA220&lpg=PA220&dq=obudio+AND+oboedio&source=bl&ots=rMMoXv_x7s&sig=JuKhRGXa0GspnWvah8G3
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA