What Lies Below Is the Truth about "Lay" and "Lie"

I’m not going to take all the misuse lying down: herein I lay down the law about the difference between “lay” and “lie.” Your confusion is about to be laid to rest.

“Lay” is a transitive verb. It requires a direct object. One lays something else—lays an object down, lays blame (perhaps with his or her teachers, for not explaining this adequately), lays waste to things, gets laid (which we will talk about in detail below), and lays the groundwork for better use of language. “Lay” is a verb of action.

“Lie” is intransitive. (We’re discussing the verb of position/location here; “lie” meaning to tell an untruth is also intransitive, but its conjugation differs. That is another subject for another day.) One may lie down, lie with one’s lover (again, more on that later), lie at something’s mercy, lie in wait, or perhaps lie to the east of something else—but one can always lie alone. Although it may encompass an action, the meaning of “lie” is more often one of position—much more passive.

Quick cheat: What follows the verb? If it’s a noun, it’s likely to be the object, in which case “lay” is correct. If it’s an adverb, “lie” is probably correct. This method is far from infallible—sentences take many shapes—but it’s a good place to start (assuming, of course, your education in grammar was not so deficient that you can’t tell a noun from an adverb).

Seems easy, doesn’t it?

Don’t get cocky.

The confusion arises when you conjugate the verbs. Specifically, the past tense of “lie” is “lay.”


Conjugate, you say? Show of hands: How many only learned to conjugate verbs when we studied a foreign language in high school? (The Grammopticon might also have fallen victim to the “grammar is just confusing them” trend in education—which is an easier answer than, oh, maybe, “we’re not doing a very good job teaching”—had not her sixth grade teacher rejected the hip new textbooks that put every sentence into one of five categories, or patterns, glossing over the parts therein. This was not least because we kept coming up with sentences that failed to fall neatly into the patterns. It seems writers have a tendency to rearrange words without asking mod, cool textbook authors about the matter. But I digress.)

Your conjugation refresher looks like this:


Let’s try it with the present (present indicative, if you want to be fussy) tense of “lay” and “lie.”


English is easy: we don’t go changing the ending of a verb every time we change the subject. Be grateful.

Simple enough in the present. But most often we talk and write about things that happened in the past:



Ah, herein lies the problem. (Bonus question for honor students: Explain why “lies” is the correct choice in the preceding sentence.) The past tense of “lie” is “lay.”

English is not always easy. But you have the Grammopticon. Be grateful.

Another quick cheat, this one more reliable: Forget about “lay” and “lie” and worry about “laid” and “lay”—you’ll use them more often. Then think of the d in “laid” as standing for “direct object.” If the verb takes a direct object—you do the laying to something, whether it be laying a piece of paper on your desk or laying the ground rules for a game of Calvinball or laying blame for your grammatical errors—that object has been “laid.”

Which brings us to the part you have been waiting for: when the laying is done to another human being, as in “got laid.” The implication of the expression is that—because there is a d and therefore a direct object—someone is doing unto someone else. However, if we open the King James Bible, we find (numerous) references to the same act, but using the phrase “lie with.”

“Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.”
—Genesis 19:32

“His master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, ‘Lie with me.’”
—Genesis 39:7

Hot times in the Old Testament tonight!

Both "get laid" and "lie with" are correct, as used. But they convey a subtly different meaning: the first a sense of somebody doing it to someone else--the object; the second a more egalitarian formulation. What that may tell us about the times and people of today versus when the King James version was translated is left for your consideration. I note the example only to make clear (once again, if you’ve been paying attention) the subtlety of meaning that any choice of words can convey.

One final anomaly for your consideration: Perhaps as a child you learned the bedtime rhyme that begins “Now I lay me down to sleep . . .” We’re back in the present tense (now), so it’s back to “lay/lie” rather than “laid/lay.” Is “lay” the right choice?

Going to sleep is a passive, solitary act: we normally lie down to sleep. However, the writer made a poetic choice, for rhythm, adding the (unnecessary but not inaccurate) “me”—but now that there’s an object involved, a transitive verb is called for: “lay” in the present. As above, it’s also a more active expression—going to sleep as an active movement out of consciousness rather than a passive collapse. What comes later in the rhyme is “if I should die before I wake” (which to my mind is more likely to keep a child awake out of fear!). Certainly the active/transitive “lay” is more appropriate if the risks of sleep may include death.

Well! On that cheery note the Grammopticon wishes you sweet dreams!