Lying

How to spell lying

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lying

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lying mean?

1. verbDeliberately saying things that are not true in order to deceive someone.
2. verbBeing in or moving into a flat, horizontal resting position.

Lying in a sentence

• The auditors proved he had been lying about the company accounts.

• The dog spent the afternoon lying in the sun on the patio.

• She insisted she was telling the truth, but her colleagues knew she was lying.

• He was lying flat on the floor doing his back exercises.

Where does lying come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This spelling actually serves two separate Old English verbs that happen to land on the same form. The 'tell a falsehood' sense descends from Old English leogan, meaning 'to deceive or speak untruth', while the 'recline' sense comes from Old English licgan, meaning 'to be in a horizontal position'. Both are native Germanic words with cousins across the old Germanic languages, such as Dutch liegen 'to lie' and German liegen 'to lie down'. The base forms settled into the modern spelling 'lie', and English follows a regular rule when adding -ing: a final -ie is dropped and replaced by y, so 'die' becomes 'dying' and 'lie' becomes 'lying'. That tidy ie-to-y switch is precisely the spot writers stumble, since the temptation is to keep the e and write the impossible 'lieing'. Because the two verbs converge on one word, only context tells a reader whether someone is being dishonest or simply stretched out on a sofa.

How the word is built

• lie (root verb)
• -ing (present participle suffix), with the i-e of 'lie' changing to a single y before the ending