Did you know?
The history of cloying isn’t sweet—it’s tough as nails. Cloying comes from the verb cloy, which in Middle English meant “to hinder or seriously injure”; its source is an Anglo-French word meaning “to prick (a horse) with a nail in shoeing.” English cloy too carried this farriery meaning (a farrier being a person who shoes horses) in the early 16th century, but it also had a general sense relating to clogging and stuffing, and in particular to overloading with especially sweet or rich food. From there quickly arose meanings of cloy still in use today: “to supply with an unwanted or distasteful excess usually of something originally pleasing” and “to be or become insipid or distasteful usually through an excess of an originally pleasurable quality (such as sweetness).” The adjective cloying, which describes things that are too sweet, pleasant, or sentimental, was doing the job it does today by the end of the 16th century.
Examples of cloying in a Sentence
Cite this Entry
“Cloying.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cloying. Accessed 20 Jan. 2026.
