Elysa Gardner 
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We won’t bore you with the sappy tale behind the word cloying, because happily, there isn’t one. That’s because its history isn’t sweet, but rather tough as nails. Cloying comes from the verb cloy, which had among its earliest uses the meaning (to quote the Oxford English Dictionary) “to render [a gun] useless by driving a spike or plug into the touch-hole.” This ultra-specific sense of clogging and stuffing arose alongside both broader and figurative ones, including “to fill or choke up,” and cloy has since come to mean “to supply or indulge to excess.” Accordingly, cloying implies a nauseating amount of something that might be pleasing in smaller doses, especially both literal and metaphorical sweetness.
Examples of cloying in a Sentence
Josh Bell, Vulture, 21 Mar. 2025
Here came the cloying sentiments, the farcical calls for unity, the moment of sorrow over a long list of recent American tragedies whose anguish this spectacle purported to relieve.
—Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 3 Mar. 2025
Unfortunately cloying ending aside, Gere and Lane are magnetic leads, and their chemistry feels real despite the film’s weaknesses.
—Sezin Devi Koehler, EW.com, 23 Feb. 2025
But as any naysayers of the ready-to-drink (RTD) category will point out, pre-mixed cocktails can be clunky — cloying and sickly sweet, unbalanced, or laden with faux flavors of lime or other once-fresh ingredients.
—Kate Dingwall, Forbes, 30 Nov. 2024
See All Example Sentences for cloying
Cite this Entry
“Cloying.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cloying. Accessed 2 Apr. 2025.
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