Writing Wednesday: Lie vs Lay

Last week I went over the differences between lie and lay with my students. As I warned them, it’s probably the hardest grammar rule out there. I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.

There are two basic steps:

1) Decide what meaning you want.

• “Lie” means “to rest or recline.”*
• “Lay” means “to put something down.”

2) Decide which form of the verb you need.

• present tense
• present participle (the -ing version)
• past tense
• past participle (used with helping verbs like have, has, and had)

The tricky part is that lie and lay are both irregular verbs, meaning that they don’t take the usually -ed ending for the past and the past participle.

Let’s look at lie (meaning “to rest or recline”) first.

• Present tense examples: Jenny lies in bed whenever she is sick. The pencils lie on the table over there.
• Present participle example: The papers are lying all over the floor.
• Past tense example: Jim lay in bed yesterday because he had the flu. (Not: Jim laid in bed.)
• Past participle example: The twins have lain in bed all week with the chicken pox. (Not: The twins have laid in bed all week.)

Now let’s look at lay (meaning “to put something down”).

• Present tense example: Lay your books on the desk, please.
• Present participle example: He is laying tile at his mother’s house.
• Past tense example: I laid the baby in the crib.
• Past perfect example: She has laid the old newspapers in a bin.

Notice the forms of lay always have an object (animate or inanimate) after them (books, tile, baby, newspapers). There has to be a “something” that is being set down.

On the other hand, if there’s no object and no actually movement, you want a form of lie.

*Lie can also mean “to tell an untruth.” However, we never seem to mess up that verb because it takes the regular -ed ending for past tense. (He lied. She has lied, too.)

photo credit: Lucia Whittaker via photopin cc