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Bray   /breɪ/   Listen
noun
Bray  n.  The harsh cry of an ass; also, any harsh, grating, or discordant sound. "The bray and roar of multitudinous London."


Bray  n.  A bank; the slope of a hill; a hill. See Brae, which is now the usual spelling. (North of Eng. & Scot.)


verb
Bray  v. t.  (past & past part. brayed; pres. part. braying)  To pound, beat, rub, or grind small or fine. "Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar,... yet will not his foolishness depart from him."


Bray  v. t.  To make or utter with a loud, discordant, or harsh and grating sound. "Arms on armor clashing, brayed Horrible discord." "And varying notes the war pipes brayed."


Bray  v. i.  
1.
To utter a loud, harsh cry, as an ass. "Laugh, and they Return it louder than an ass can bray."
2.
To make a harsh, grating, or discordant noise. "Heard ye the din of battle bray?"





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Bray" Quotes from Famous Books



... chest is a bulkhead, that dams off the gale; and his nose is an aquiline, that divides it in two, like a keel. His loud, lusty lungs are two belfries, full of all manner of chimes; but you only hear his deepest bray, in the height of some tempest—like the great bell of St. Paul's, which only sounds when the King or the Devil ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... place in the seventeenth century, when the foul fiend possessed them with a spirit of contradiction, which uniformly involved them in controversy with the ruling powers. They reversed the conduct of the celebrated Vicar of Bray, and adhered as tenaciously to the weaker side, as that worthy divine to the stronger. And truly, like ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... watch a puma kitten sitting beside you in the opera house, especially when your mere brain tells you she is probably a sweet, even-tempered little matron, or to wait in pained expectancy for your large-eared minister to bray, even though you know he will not depart from his measured exposition of sound and sane doctrine. However, the Penguin Persons are such by virtue of their moral and mental attributes solely, of the ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... that I'll maintain Until my dying day, sir: That whatsoever king shall reign I'll still be vicar of Bray, sir! ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... There never was an animal less fit to be a singer. Someone—was it Cowper?—-has said that there are no really ugly voices in nature, and that he could imagine that there was something to be said even for the donkey's bray. I should have thought that the beautiful voices in nature were few, and that most of them could be defended only on the ground of some pleasant association. Humanity, at least, has been unanimous in its condemnation of the cat as part of nature's chorus. Poems ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd


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