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Lay can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.

lay used as a noun:

  1. Arrangement or relationship; layout.
    "the lay of the land (rather than the standard the lie of the land)."
  2. The direction a rope is twisted.
    "Worm and parcel with the lay; turn and serve the other way."
  3. A casual sexual partner.
    "What was I, just another lay you can toss aside as you go on to your next conquest?"
  4. A ballad or sung poem.
    "1805 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Sir Walter Scott"
  5. a short song
  6. a short poem or narrative, one usually intended to be sung

Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →

lay used as an adjective:

  1. Non-professional, not being a member of an organized institution (e.g. scientific lay person).
    "A lay judge: a judge selected from among the people, usually to sit alongside professional judges."
  2. Not belonging to the clergy, but associated with them.
    "They seemed more lay than clerical."

Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →

lay used as a verb:

  1. To place something down in a position of rest.
  2. To cause to subside or abate.
  3. To leave something somewhere.
  4. To prepare (e.g., the groundwork, the table).
  5. To install certain building materials, laying one thing on top of another.
    "lay brick"
  6. To produce and deposit an egg.
  7. To wager that an event will not take place.
  8. To lie, of which the past tense is 'lay'.
    "To have sexual intercourse with someone, especially in a casual manner (rather than the standard 'to lie with s.o.')"
  9. when pertaining to position.
    "The baby lay in its crib and slept silently."

Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →

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What type of word is lay?

As detailed above, 'lay' can be a noun, an adjective or a verb. Here are some examples of its usage:
  1. Noun usage: the lay of the land (rather than the standard the lie of the land).
  2. Noun usage: Worm and parcel with the lay; turn and serve the other way.
  3. Noun usage: What was I, just another lay you can toss aside as you go on to your next conquest?
  4. Noun usage: 1805 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Sir Walter Scott
  5. Adjective usage: A lay judge: a judge selected from among the people, usually to sit alongside professional judges.
  6. Adjective usage: They seemed more lay than clerical.
  7. Adjective usage: A lay brother: A monk who has not fully entered into the monastic life and vows. 'The male branch of the Franciscan family, a community of Lesser Brothers, is made up of men who are both clergy and consecrated laity traditionally called "lay brothers".'
  8. Verb usage: lay brick
  9. Verb usage: lay flooring
  10. Verb usage: To have sexual intercourse with someone, especially in a casual manner (rather than the standard 'to lie with s.o.')
  11. Verb usage: The baby lay in its crib and slept silently.

Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of lay are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of lay, and guess at its most common usage.

Word Type

For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

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