Other forms: trays
A tray is the flat board with a low rim that you carry plates and cups on without dropping them. Think of the one you slide along the rails in a canteen, or the one a waiter balances on a flat hand above his shoulder.
A tray does not have to be carried anywhere: the ice tray in the freezer, the seed tray on a windowsill, the in-tray of paper on a desk and the paper tray in a printer all sit still. In a kitchen you bake on a baking tray and roast on a roasting tray. Things go ON a tray, never in one, because the rim is only a lip to stop them sliding off. A trayful is as much as one tray will hold. Cat owners in Britain have a litter tray; Americans have a litter box.
1nountrayA flat, shallow board with a raised edge, used for carrying food, drinks or other small things.~50%
“He came upstairs with breakfast on a tray and set it down on the bed.”
Patternon a tray · a baking / serving / ice tray · carry a tray · a tray of + noun
synonyms: salver
2nounopenA shallow open container that holds things in place rather than carrying them, such as an ice tray or a desk tray.~50%
“The ice tray was empty again, and nobody would admit to it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
tray is a shallow container.
The oldest root is the same as tree: the first trays were flat boards of wood you carried the food on.
hooks ontotree
Tray goes back to Old English trēġ, a wooden board, from Proto-Germanic trawją, a wooden vessel, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European word for tree and wood. So a tray is named after the material, not the shape. Trough and tree are its cousins: three things cut from the same word for timber.
Middle English
trey
English, today
tray
Built from
From Middle English trey. From Middle English trey, from Old English trēġ, trīġ (“wooden board, tray”), from Proto-West Germanic trauwi, from Proto-Germanic trawją (“wooden vessel”), from Proto-Indo-European drewo-, dóru (“tree; wood”). Cognate with Old Norse treyja (“carrier”), gmq-osw trø (“wooden grain measure”), Low German Treechel (“dough trough”), Ancient Greek δροίτη (“tub, vat”), Sanskrit द्रोण (“trough”). Related to trough and tree.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA