Definition of "virelay" [vir•e•lay]

• Any of several medieval French verse and song forms, especially one in which each stanza has two rhymes, the end rhyme recurring as the first rhyme of the following stanza. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Then last of all haue ye a proportion to be vsed in the number of your staues, as to a caroll and a ballade, to a song, & a round, or virelay."
• ""Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose, and others, along with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc."
• "Borrow has resuscitated a literary form which had been many years abandoned, and he has resuscitated it in no artificial manner -- as a rhythmical form is rehabilitated, or as a dilettante re-establishes for a moment the vogue of the roundel or the virelay -- but quite naturally as the inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life."