relay
Pluralrelays
Pluralrelays
Formsrelays, relaying, relayed
- 1A track and field event in which runners take turns carrying a baton from start to finish, most often over 4×100 or 4×400 meters.
Our women's team set a school record in the 4×100 relay.
A fumbled baton on the last exchange cost them a place in the relay final.
Note
Each runner covers one leg and passes the baton to the next inside a marked exchange zone; a pass outside it disqualifies the team. Events are named by the number of runners and the distance each one runs, so 4×100 means four legs of 100 meters, said aloud as "four by one hundred." The last runner, often the fastest, is called the anchor.
- 2ri-LAY/ɹiˈleɪ/To pass information on to someone else, or transmit it from one place to another.
Satellites relay live pictures from the stadium to viewers around the world.
A spokesperson relayed the family's request for privacy to reporters.
Similartransmit, convey, pass, communicate, forward
- 3A contest between teams in which members take turns completing part of a course or performing a set task.
The counselors organized a sack-race relay for the last afternoon of camp.
She swam the butterfly leg of the medley relay.
Note
Each turn is a leg, and the whole idea is the handover: a fresh member takes over where a tired one stops, just as fresh horses along a route once did. Relay race is the fuller name. The word covers any turn-taking contest, from a medley in the pool to a sack race at summer camp; the baton race on the track is the athletics version.
- 4An electrical device that lets a relatively small voltage or current control a larger voltage or current.
A faulty relay kept the furnace from switching on.
The control board uses a relay so that a five-volt signal can operate a 240-volt pump.
Note
In its classic form the device is electromagnetic: current through a coil pulls a metal arm that opens or closes a separate circuit, which is why relays click. Solid-state relays do the same job with semiconductors and no moving parts. Because the two circuits never touch, a relay lets a small control signal switch a heavy load while keeping delicate electronics apart from it.
- 5A fresh set or supply of anything.
A fresh relay of reporters arrived each morning to take over the stakeout.
Relays of hot coffee and pastries appeared throughout the long meeting.
Note
The extended sense often comes in the plural, where relays of something are fresh supplies that keep arriving. Dickens's Dombey and Son has a hard grey eye gleaming at the thought of "rounds of buttered toast, relays of hot chops," and the phrase works as well for food brought in batch after batch as for workers or reporters taking turns.
- 6A series of vehicles traveling in sequence, one after another.
A relay of ambulances ferried the injured from the crash site to three hospitals.
The quarry kept a steady relay of dump trucks moving gravel to the dam site.
Similarstream, convoy, procession
- 7Sayree-LAYUS/ˌɹiˈleɪ/UK/ˌɹiːˈleɪ/Alternative spelling of re-lay.
The railroad will relay the branch line over the winter so heavier engines can use it.
After the flood, we had to relay the entire kitchen floor.
Note
This relay is a different verb that only shares the spelling: re- plus lay, so it means laying something again, and railway writers use it for new track. It takes the forms of lay, with relaid in the past, while the verb for passing things on has relayed. Where the difference matters, the hyphenated re-lay keeps the two apart.
- 8A fresh set of horses kept ready along a particular route to replace animals that have grown tired.
The royal messenger rode through the night, picking up a fresh relay of horses at each post house.
Without relays waiting along the road, the stagecoach could never have kept its schedule.
Note
Now met chiefly in history, this is the arrangement that let a courier or a coach keep up its pace: tired horses were left at each post house along the route while a fresh relay carried the journey on. Relays of horses is the usual phrase, and the matching verb meant to change horses at such a stop.
- 9In hunting, a fresh set of hounds.
When the first pack tired, the huntsman sent in a relay of fresh hounds.
A second relay waited at the edge of the forest, ready to take up the chase.
Note
The word began in the hunt: a Middle French relai was a reserve pack held back to take over the chase when the first hounds tired. Behind it lies relaier, literally "to leave behind," because the spent animals stayed while fresh ones went on. In English this hunting noun is rare, and the idea of a fresh team now lives mainly in the post-horse meaning and the team race.
- 10ri-LAY/ɹiˈleɪ/To station people or horses at intervals so that fresh ones can take over in turn.
The army relayed fresh horses at every village so that its dispatches could cross the country in two days.
The expedition planned to relay teams of porters along the trail so the loads never stopped moving.
Note
Modern English rarely uses this verb, saying the same thing with the noun instead: workers or horses are organized in relays. The verb takes the people or animals as its object, so they relayed horses along the road means they stationed them in turns, not that they handed them on like a message passed along.
- 11ri-LAY/ɹiˈleɪ/To swap tired horses for fresh ones at a stage on a journey.
The courier relayed at each post house and reached the capital by dawn.
Travelers who could afford to relay every twenty miles made the trip in half the time.
Note
Here the traveler does the relaying, taking on fresh horses at a stop; the horses go unmentioned, since the verb takes no object. It is the rider's side of the post-horse system, and outside historical writing changed horses is the phrase a modern reader would use.
- 12ri-LAY/ɹiˈleɪ/In hunting, to let loose a fresh set of hounds.
Huntsmen who relay too early waste their best hounds.
The master waited until the pack flagged, then relayed at the edge of the forest.
Note
An obsolete verb of the hunting field, it took no object: the huntsmen relayed, and the fresh hounds were understood rather than named. Nobody uses it in describing a hunt today; a modern account would speak of sending in a fresh pack instead.
Showing meanings only.
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Origins
From Middle French relai ("reserve pack of hounds"), from relaier ("to exchange tired animals for fresh"), from Old French relaier ("to leave behind"), from re- + laier ("to leave"), which is of uncertain origin.
Formed from re- + lay.