ally
Pluralallies
Pluralallies
- 1
- 2A friend or associate, or someone who gives another person help or cooperates with them.
Throughout the dispute, she proved a reliable ally to the junior staff.
He counted the librarian among his closest allies on campus.
Similarsupporter, friend, associate, partner, helper
Oppositeenemy, opponent, adversary
Note
The noun has two parents: the English verb, and Anglo-Norman allié, which already meant associate, supporter, friend and relative. That double origin explains why the noun can mean a helper as easily as a treaty partner or a kinsman. In this personal sense the scale is small: Washington Irving's "trusty ally" carries a blunderbuss, and Joyce's young Stephen "became the ally of a boy" and founded a gang with him.
- 3A person or organization that supports a demographic group facing discrimination without belonging to it; specifically, someone outside the LGBT+ community who backs it.
The company positioned itself as an ally of marginalized communities.
Many straight allies attended the rally in solidarity.
Similarsupporter, advocate, champion
Note
A specialized use of the helper sense, defined by the supporter's position outside the group rather than by the help itself. In LGBTQ usage, it names supporters who are not LGBT+ themselves. It commonly takes to or of to name the group supported (a better ally to the disabled, an ally of marginalized communities).
- 4To enter into an alliance or unite with another for a common purpose.
Several nations chose to ally against the common threat.
The two factions allied to overthrow the regime.
Note
Here the verb stands alone, and with introduces the partner. Gilbert Burnet (1673) has Constantine allying with Licinius and sealing the bond by giving him his sister in marriage. Bulwer-Lytton's Athens has a conqueror offer pardon: "If they will ally with me, rebuild the temples I have burnt." The closest idiomatic equivalent is to make common cause, which also needs no object.
- 5To unite or form a connection between people or things, as families through marriage or states through treaty.
A single treaty can ally nations that once fought bitterly.
Centuries of diplomacy allied the two kingdoms through repeated marriages.
Similarunite, join, bind, link
Note
Marriage and treaty sit side by side in this sense because Middle English allien already meant both forming an alliance and marrying or becoming related. John Lightfoot's chronicle of 1634 shows the two at once: by wedding Pharaoh's daughter, Solomon "allieth that potent King to him." The usual pattern is to ally one party to another, and Shakespeare favors the passive form, allied to.
- 6
- 7To join or unite oneself with, or against, another person, group, or thing.
Smaller firms often ally themselves with a dominant partner to survive.
The duke allied himself with the crown against the rebels.
Similaralign, associate, affiliate
Oppositedissociate, distance
Note
The reflexive pronoun is essential here: a person or group allies himself, herself or itself, and the preposition names the other side. In Richardson's Pamela (1742), titled families "have ally'd themselves to Trade," meaning they married into money, so the family sense of uniting by marriage is still close by. Macaulay's Halifax "allied himself closely with the Whigs" shows the political use. Without the pronoun, the result is the intransitive verb.
- 8To connect or relate something to another by similarity in features or nature.
Linguists ally those dialects with a single ancestral tongue.
The critic allied the painting to earlier Flemish work.
Similarassociate, link, connect, relate
Note
It usually appears as a participle, with an adverb that measures how close the likeness is: well allied, near allied, nearest allied. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681) gives the classic line, "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," and Pope's An Essay on Man (1733) follows the same pattern with virtue "nearest to our vice allied." The adverb sets the degree of kinship, and to introduces the thing it resembles.
- 9A thing considered akin to another because the two share features or a common nature.
Botanists treat the herb as a close ally of mint.
Chemically the two minerals are allies, differing only in trace elements.
Similarrelative, cousin, relation
Note
The noun partner of the "related by nature" verb, and it shares the verb's habit of measuring closeness. In Drayton, the violet is the pansy's "neere Alye." Thomas Stanley calls medicine an art's "nearest ally." William Derham moves from the mouth to "its near Allie the Stomach." Near and nearest are its usual companions, and the biologist's use of the word grows from this sense.
- 10An organism related to another through common evolutionary origin; specifically, a species closely related to another, usually within the same family.
The cultivated apple and its wild ally share many traits.
Taxonomists grouped the new species with its nearest allies.
Similarrelative
Note
Taxonomists use the plural in a set formula that extends a familiar name to cover its relatives: "cranes and their allies," "raccoons and their allies." The phrase works as an informal group label, often explaining a formal name such as Procyonids. Here the kinship is evolutionary descent, usually within one family, rather than the loose resemblance of the general "related thing" sense.
- 11A person belonging to the same family as another.
Note
Modern readers can easily mistake this older family sense for the political one. When Shakespeare calls a wounded gentleman "the Prince's near ally," he means a kinsman, not a partner in a pact. Mark Twain still uses it in 1892: after a quiet wedding, the Sellerses travel with their "new allies," the in-laws the marriage has given them. Outside historical writing, use relative or kinsman instead.
- 12Groups, states, or people united with one another for a common purpose; collectively, confederates; also the condition of being allied, an alliance or confederation.
Note
The obsolete use could name the condition of being allied as well as the parties: what modern English calls an alliance or confederation. In current English the word refers only to the partners themselves, as in the treaty-partner sense. When an older text seems to use it for the bond rather than the members, alliance is the right modern reading.
- 13A person's relatives considered collectively; also, the state of being related to someone by descent or marriage.
Note
This sense refers to the whole circle of relatives, or to the bond of kinship itself, rather than one person. John Heywood's The Spider and the Flie (1556) pairs it with its near-synonym in the phrase "all kyn and aly." For a single relative, older English used the kinsman sense. Today, kin, kindred or kinship does the same work.
- 14AL-ee/ˈæli/Alternative spelling of alley.
The boy prized one large ally above all his other marbles.
A well-aimed ally scattered the cluster in the center.
Note
A separate word that happens to share the spelling: an obsolete way of writing alley in its marbles sense, a glass marble or taw. Its history belongs with alley, not with alliances or kinship. The spelling stood only for the marble, never for the narrow street or the bowling alley.
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Origins
From Middle English allien (to form an alliance, join, unite), borrowed through Anglo-Norman and Old French alier (to join together, unite, or alloy metals), from Latin alligare, from ad- (an intensifying prefix) plus ligo (to bind or tie), tracing back to Proto-Indo-European *leyǵ- (to bind, tie). It is a doublet of allay, alligate, alloy, and ligament.
From Middle English allie, probably formed partly from the verb allien (see etymology 1) and partly from Anglo-Norman and Old French allié (an associate, supporter, or state united with another by treaty), which was a noun use of the past participle of the verb alier.