Illustration for Lay and Lie: The Pair Almost Nobody Gets Right

Lay and Lie: The Pair Almost Nobody Gets Right

ByNathan Cole

This is the hardest common verb pair in English, and the difficulty is not your fault. The past tense of one is the present tense of the other.

The distinction

  • Lay needs an object. You lay something down. Lay the book on the table.
  • Lie takes no object. You lie down yourself. I need to lie down.

The test: substitute place. If place fits, use lay. Place the book on the table works, so lay. Place down for an hour does not, so lie.

The tables that cause the trouble

Lay (to place something):

  • Present: lay — I lay the book down.
  • Past: laid — I laid the book down.
  • Past participle: laid — I have laid the book down.

Lie (to recline):

  • Present: lie — I lie down.
  • Past: lay — Yesterday I lay down.
  • Past participle: lain — I have lain down.

There it is. Lay is both the present of one verb and the past of the other. No amount of care makes that intuitive.

The errors, in order of frequency

  • I’m going to lay down. → lie down. There is no object.
  • The dog was laying in the sun. → lying. Unless the dog was laying eggs.
  • I laid in bed all morning. → lay in bed. Past of lie.
  • He had laid there for hours. → had lain.

Almost every error is lay being used where lie belongs. The reverse is rare.

The third verb nobody mentions

Lie also means to tell an untruth, and that one is regular: lie, lied, lied. He lied about it, never he lay about it.

So three verbs share two spellings across five forms. English has few tangles this bad.

Does it matter?

Less than most usage disputes. Lay for lie is so widespread in speech that Merriam-Webster notes the distinction has been eroding for three hundred years, and nobody has ever been confused by I’m going to lay down.

But it remains one of the errors that careful readers notice, and it appears frequently in edited prose, which means editors are still enforcing it.

The shortcut

If you cannot hold the tables in your head, hold this: you lie down; you lay something down. Then, for the past, remember the one sentence that contains the trap: Yesterday I lay down, after I had laid the book aside.

Or write around it. I went to bed, I put the book down, the dog was stretched out in the sun — all clearer than the correct version, and none of them risky.

Checked against Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Spotted an error? Tell us — see our editorial policy.

Nathan Cole writes the adjective guides and word lists on Grammar Simplified. Every guide he publishes is checked against Merriam-Webster for spelling and usage, the Chicago Manual of Style for punctuation, and the AP Stylebook where a convention is specific to web writing. Where a rule is genuinely disputed among those authorities, he says so in the guide rather than picking a side quietly. Corrections are welcome and get acted on — see the editorial policy.

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