Style Snapshot: Lie, Lay

We’ve had a lot of uses of lie and lay this week, and in some cases we’ve gotten it wrong. We wanted to give a quick reminder about how to use lie and lay.

Here is one simple way (and present tense way) to remember this is and in keeping with our current news:

Protesters lie in the street. The protesters lay the signs down.

lie, lay – Lie is intransitive and does not take an object: lie, lay, lain. Lay is transitive and takes an object: lay, laid, laid.

The confusing thing is that lay is the past tense of lie, so correct usage depends on whether the action is currently happening, is going to happen in the future, or happened in the past.

The protesters will lie in the road tomorrow. (future tense)
The protesters lie in the road. (present tense)
The protesters lay in the road yesterday. (past tense)
The protesters had lain in the road last week. (past participle, or past perfect tense)

Thank you.
Kim