Lay

How to spell lay

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lay

What does lay mean?

1. verbTo put or set something down carefully in a particular position.
2. adjectiveNot belonging to the clergy, or not having professional or specialist knowledge of a subject.
3. verbThe past tense of 'lie', meaning to have been in a flat or resting position.

Lay in a sentence

• verb

  Please lay the cutlery neatly beside each plate.

• adjective

  A lay member of the committee read the financial summary aloud.

• verb

  Yesterday the old dog lay in the warm sun for hours.

• verb

  The engineers will lay new cable along the whole street next week.

• adjective

  The surgeon explained the procedure in plain lay terms for the family.

• verb

  The abandoned village lay silent beneath the snow all that winter.

Where does lay come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word descending from the Old English verb lecgan, which meant 'to cause to lie down' or 'to put in place'. It was the causative partner of licgan, the verb that gives us modern 'lie' (to recline), which is exactly why the two have tangled together ever since: to 'lay' something is literally to make it 'lie'. Both go back to a shared Germanic root that also produced Dutch leggen and German legen, all carrying the sense of placing or putting down. The everyday confusion between 'lay' (you lay an object somewhere) and 'lie' (a person lies down) is a direct echo of this ancient grammatical pairing. A separate and much later sense, 'lay' meaning non-clerical or non-expert, arrived through Old French lai from the Greek laikos 'of the people', and although spelled the same it is a different word entirely.

How the word is built

• lay (a single root from Old English lecgan, the causative of licgan 'to lie'; no prefix or suffix)