Elysa Gardner 
Did you know?
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
Brian Truitt, USA Today, 20 June 2025
The Jeju Island firefly forest sequence is staged ingeniously in the show, but this song is cloying twee rather than funny, sprightly twee or the classic-sounding crooning of the show’s Gil Brentley numbers.
—Bethy Squires, Vulture, 9 June 2025
This is a dessert bourbon in all the right ways — rich, warm, and indulgent, but never cloying.
—Emily Price, Forbes.com, 29 May 2025
Instead, though from an Japanese breed, this American beef had plenty of flavor without being cloying, so that a trencherman at my table polished off the whole slab.
—John Mariani, Forbes.com, 1 May 2025
See All Example Sentences for cloying
Cite this Entry
“Cloying.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cloying. Accessed 30 Jun. 2025.
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