Other forms: rallies, rallied, rallying
A rally is a crowd that has come out on purpose. Flags, a stage at one end, a few thousand people in a square listening to somebody with a microphone.
The verb is the more useful half, and it pulls two ways: to rally is to gather people together, and to rally is to pick up after a bad patch. A captain rallies the team at half time; a sick man rallies in the night; the market falls all morning and rallies by four. In tennis a rally is the run of shots that goes back and forth before anybody wins the point, and in motor sport a rally is a long race over rough roads, run stage by stage. Rally round somebody and you are one of the friends who turn up when things go wrong.
1nounrallyA large public meeting held to show support for something.~86%
“Thousands went to the rally in the square.”
synonyms: demonstration, gathering
2verbtogetherTo come together, or bring people together, for a shared purpose.~10%
“The captain rallied his team at half time.”
3verbrecoverTo recover after a bad spell.~2%
“The patient rallied overnight.”
4nounsportsA long exchange of shots in tennis before a point is won.~2%
“The rally lasted thirty-two shots.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 164 sentences found in the wild and placed 67 of them on a sense (97 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
RALLY → a VALLEY
Picture a green valley with a stage at the bottom of it. People come over both hills and down the sides until the grass has gone and the whole valley is heads and flags.
hooks ontovalley
Old French ralier was to tie a thing back together, built on Latin ligare, to bind — the root that also gives us ally. A commander whose line had broken rallied it: bound the scattered men back into one body. Every later sense keeps that shape. A crowd bound together in a square, a team bound back together at half time, a man whose strength comes back together overnight.
Old French
ralier
Middle French
rallier
English, today
rally
Built from
From Middle French rallier (French rallier), from Old French ralier, from Latin - prefix re- + ad + ligare (“to bind; to ally”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA