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pie¹

(pī)

1. A dish composed of fruit, meat, cheese, or other ingredients baked over, under, or surrounded by a crust of pastry or other dough.

2. A layer cake having cream, custard, or jelly filling.

3. Informal A pizza.

4. Something similar to or resembling pie: mud pie.

5. A whole that can be portioned out: "That would ... enlarge the economic pie by making the most productive use of every investment dollar" (New York Times).

Idiom:

pie in the sky

An empty wish or promise: "To outlaw deficits ... is pie in the sky" (Howard H. Baker, Jr.).

[Middle English.]

pie²

(pī)

See magpie.

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

pie³

(pī)

A former unit of currency of India.

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

pie⁴

(pī)

An almanac of services used in the English church before the Reformation.

[Medieval Latin pīca.]

pie⁵

(pī)

n. & v.
Printing

Variant of pi².

PIE

abbr.

Proto-Indo-European

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

Indo-European Roots

Semitic Roots

The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

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