Other forms: shays
A shay is a light open one-horse buggy on two wheels. A one-horse shay, drive the shay, the old shay.
It is old rural American speech and survives chiefly in the poem about the wonderful one-horse shay that ran a hundred years and then fell apart all at once. The word came about by mistake: chaise was taken for a plural and cut back to shay.
1nounshayA light open one-horse buggy on two wheels.
“The country doctor drove out to the farm in his little one-horse shay.”
shay is a carriage.
A back-formation from chaise, whose final sound was mistaken for a plural ending and dropped.
A a back-formation from chaise (originally from French -), with the of that word taken as the plural ending -s.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA