Laid

How to spell laid

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce laid

What does laid mean?

1. verbPast tense and past participle of 'lay': placed something down carefully in a position.

Laid in a sentence

• She laid the documents on the desk before the meeting began.

• The builders laid the foundation last week.

Where does laid come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense and past participle of the verb 'lay', which descends from the Old English lecgan, meaning 'to put or set down'. That verb was the causative partner of licgan, 'to lie or rest', so lecgan literally meant 'to cause something to lie'. Over centuries the inflected forms were smoothed and shortened, so the regular-looking 'layed' was abandoned in favour of the compact 'laid', spelled with a single 'd' on an '-aid' stem. The same Germanic root sits behind the modern words 'lay', 'lie', 'ledge' and 'low', all carrying the underlying idea of something resting on a surface. The mismatch between the present 'lay' and the past 'laid' is exactly the spelling trap, since the 'y' vanishes and the ending is just 'd', not 'yed'.

How the word is built

• lay (Old English lecgan: to place down)
• -d (past-tense and past-participle ending; the verb's irregular spelling replaces the expected 'layed')