Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A former unit of currency of India.
  • noun An almanac of services used in the English church before the Reformation.
  • noun A baked food composed of a pastry shell filled with fruit, meat, cheese, or other ingredients, and usually covered with a pastry crust.
  • noun A layer cake having cream, custard, or jelly filling.
  • noun A whole that can be shared.
  • idiom (pie in the sky) An empty wish or promise.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In Italy, a measure of length, the foot, equal, at Lucca, to 11.94 inches.
  • noun A dish consisting of a thin layer of pastry filled with a preparation of meat, fish, fowl, fruit, or vegetables, seasoned, generally covered with a thicker layer of pastry, and baked: as, beefsteak pie; oyster pie; chicken pie; pumpkin pie; custard pie.
  • noun Pies are sometimes made without the under thin layer of pastry. See pudding, tart, and turnover.
  • noun A mound or pit for keeping potatoes.
  • noun A compost-heap.
  • noun A magpie.
  • noun Hence Some similar or related bird; any pied bird: with a qualifying term: as, the smoky pie, Psilorhinus morio; the wandering pie of India, Temnurus (or Dendrocitta) vagabundus; the river-pie, or dipper, Cinclus aquaticus; the long-tailed pie, or titmouse, Acredula rosea; the murdering pie, or great gray shrike, Lanius excubitor; the sea-pie, or oyster-catcher; the Seoulton pewit or pie (see under pewit); etc.
  • noun Figuratively, a prating gossip or tattler.
  • See pi.
  • noun The smallest Anglo-Indian copper coin, equal to one third of a pice, or one twelfth of an anna —about one fourth of a United States cent.
  • noun Formerly, a coin equal to one fourth of an anna.
  • noun A Spanish and Spanish-American unit of length, the foot, equal to from 10.97 to 11.13 inches in Spain, and to 11.37 inches in Argentina.
  • noun Same as ordinal, 2 .
  • noun An index; a register; a list: as, a pie of sheriffs in the reign of Henry VIII

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A magpie.
  • noun Any other species of the genus Pica, and of several allied genera.
  • noun (R. C. Ch.) The service book.
  • noun (Pritn.) Type confusedly mixed. See Pi.
  • noun an adjuration equivalent to “by God and the service book.”
  • noun (Zoöl.) any Asiatic bird of the genus Dendrocitta, allied to the magpie.
  • noun (Zoöl.) See French pie, under French.
  • noun An article of food consisting of paste baked with something in it or under it
  • noun Prov. Eng. See Camp, n., 5.
  • noun the paste of a pie.
  • transitive verb See pi.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun obsolete Magpie.
  • noun historical The smallest unit of currency in South Asia, equivalent to 1/192 of a rupee or 1/12 of an anna.
  • noun A type of pastry that consists of an outer crust and a filling.
  • noun Extended to other, non-pastry dishes that maintain the general concept of a shell with a filling.
  • noun Northeastern US Pizza.
  • noun figuratively The whole of a wealth or resource, to be divided in parts.
  • noun A disorderly mess of spilt type.
  • noun cricket An especially badly bowled ball.
  • noun pejorative a gluttonous person.
  • noun slang vulva
  • verb transitive To hit in the face with a pie, either for comic effect or as a means of protest (see also pieing).
  • verb transitive To go around (a corner) in a guarded manner.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun dish baked in pastry-lined pan often with a pastry top
  • noun a prehistoric unrecorded language that was the ancestor of all Indo-European languages

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin pīca.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Hindi pā'ī, from Sanskrit pādikā, quarter, from pāt, pad-, foot, leg; see ped- in Indo-European roots.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Medieval Latin pīca.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French pie, from Latin pica, feminine of picus ("woodpecker").

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Hindi पाई (pāī, "quarter"), from Sanskrit पादिका (pādikā).

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English, unknown origin.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word pie.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • this means foot in spanish

    August 2, 2008

  • Quite surprisingly, the Wikipedia article for pie is semi-protected.

    March 15, 2010

  • "Pie, at least for C. W. Gesner, was emblematic of all that was wrong with America's eating habits:

    'We are fond of pies and tarts. We cry for pie when we are infants. Pie in countless varieties waits upon us through life. Pie kills us finally. We have apple-pie, peach-pie, rhubarb-pie, cherry-pie, pumpkin-pie, plum-pie, custard-pie, oyster-pie, lemon-pie, and hosts of other pies. Potatoes are diverted from their proper place as boiled or baked, and made into a nice heavy crust to these pies, rendering them as incapable of being acted upon by the gastric juice as if they were sulphate of baryta, a chemical which boiling vitriol will hardly dissolve. ... How can a person with a pound of green apples and fat dough in his stomach feel at ease?'"

    —Susan Williams, Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 172

    May 3, 2010

  • What is wrong with that man??

    *nibbles on pie crust*

    May 4, 2010

  • Shockingly, I think it was a woman. But no way to tell.

    May 4, 2010

  • Anyone got an idea about the origin of "pie"?

    July 2, 2010