(a.) Of or pertaining to the laity, as distinct from the clergy; as, a lay person; a lay preacher; a lay brother.
(a.) Not educated or cultivated; ignorant.
(a.) Not belonging to, or emanating from, a particular profession; unprofessional; as, a lay opinion regarding the nature of a disease.
(n.) The laity; the common people.
(n.) A meadow. See Lea.
(n.) Faith; creed; religious profession.
(n.) A law.
(n.) An obligation; a vow.
(a.) A song; a simple lyrical poem; a ballad.
(a.) A melody; any musical utterance.
(v. t.) To cause to lie down, to be prostrate, or to lie against something; to put or set down; to deposit; as, to lay a book on the table; to lay a body in the grave; a shower lays the dust.
(v. t.) To place in position; to establish firmly; to arrange with regularity; to dispose in ranks or tiers; as, to lay a corner stone; to lay bricks in a wall; to lay the covers on a table.
(v. t.) To prepare; to make ready; to contrive; to provide; as, to lay a snare, an ambush, or a plan.
(v. t.) To spread on a surface; as, to lay plaster or paint.
(v. t.) To cause to be still; to calm; to allay; to suppress; to exorcise, as an evil spirit.
(v. t.) To cause to lie dead or dying.
(v. t.) To deposit, as a wager; to stake; to risk.
(v. t.) To bring forth and deposit; as, to lay eggs.
(v. t.) To apply; to put.
(v. t.) To impose, as a burden, suffering, or punishment; to assess, as a tax; as, to lay a tax on land.
(v. t.) To impute; to charge; to allege.
(v. t.) To impose, as a command or a duty; as, to lay commands on one.
(v. t.) To present or offer; as, to lay an indictment in a particular county; to lay a scheme before one.
(v. t.) To state; to allege; as, to lay the venue.
(v. t.) To point; to aim; as, to lay a gun.
(v. t.) To put the strands of (a rope, a cable, etc.) in their proper places and twist or unite them; as, to lay a cable or rope.
(v. t.) To place and arrange (pages) for a form upon the imposing stone.
(v. t.) To place (new type) properly in the cases.
(v. i.) To produce and deposit eggs.
(v. i.) To take a position; to come or go; as, to lay forward; to lay aloft.
(v. i.) To lay a wager; to bet.
(n.) That which lies or is laid or is conceived of as having been laid or placed in its position; a row; a stratum; a layer; as, a lay of stone or wood.
(v. t.) A wager.
(v. t.) A job, price, or profit.
(v. t.) A share of the proceeds or profits of an enterprise; as, when a man ships for a whaling voyage, he agrees for a certain lay.
(v. t.) A measure of yarn; a lea. See 1st Lea (a).
(v. t.) The lathe of a loom. See Lathe, 3.
(v. t.) A plan; a scheme.
(imp.) of Lie
Example Sentences:
(1) Typological and archaeological investigations indicate that the church building represents originally the hospital facility for the lay brothers of the monastery, which according to the chronicle of the monastery was built in the beginning of the 14th century.
(2) Labour MP Jamie Reed, whose Copeland constituency includes Sellafield, called on the government to lay out details of a potential plan to build a new Mox plant at the site.
(3) The hippocampus plays an essential role in the laying down of cognitive memories, the pathway to the frontal lobe being via the MD thalamus.
(4) The glory lay in the defiance, although the outcome of the tie scarcely looks promising for Arsenal when the return at Camp Nou next Tuesday is borne in mind.
(5) As of July 1987, 10 states have prohibitory laws, five states have grandmother clauses authorizing practicing midwives under repealed statutes, five states have enabling laws which are not used, and 10 states explicitly permit lay midwives to practice.
(6) Speaking at The Carbon Show in London today, Philippe Chauvancy, director at climate exchange BlueNext, said that the announcement last week that it is to develop China's first standard for voluntary emission reduction projects alongside the government-backed China Beijing Environmental Exchange, could lay the foundations for a voluntary cap-and-trade scheme.
(7) He speeded the process of decolonisation, and was the first British prime minister to appreciate that Britain's future lay with Europe.
(8) This situation suppressed egg laying and resulted in a clearly decreased bone mineralization.
(9) Agir, launched in June as the Sahel crisis was taking hold, lays out a roadmap for better co-ordination of humanitarian and development aid to protect the most vulnerable people when drought hits again.
(10) The charity Bite the Ballot , which persuaded hundreds of thousands to register before the last general election, is to set up “democracy cafes” in Starbucks branches, laying on experts to explain how to register and vote, and what the referendum is all about (Bite the Ballot does not take sides but merely encourages participation).
(11) To overcome some of these problems it is suggested that an investigation of lay evaluation of health care should be carried out within a conceptual framework which incorporates the following elements.
(12) Three of the abscesses were intrapulmonary, and each lay adjacent to a pleural surface.
(13) Nowadays hardly a publication comes out of the regulator without it laying down another "matter for government".
(14) An intelligence officer told Associated Press that they were aware of the movement, but that the military is acting with care as many civilians are still trapped in the town and Boko Haram is laying land mines around it.
(15) After 14 minutes, Rose got in behind the Hull defence to lay on the opening goal for Eriksen while the second followed an incision up the other flank from Walker.
(16) In contrast, bilateral lesions of all cerebral ganglion peripheral nerves did not abolish spontaneous egg laying, suggesting that sensory input to the cerebral ganglion is not necessary for activating the bag cells.
(17) Several axon terminals lay close to blood vessels, and may modulate the activity of these vessels.
(18) Seasonal and habitat influences on the egg-laying activity of four species of Culex were compared in south Florida using jar- and vat-type oviposition traps.
(19) Those fed royal jelly as larvae emerge as queens and do little but lay eggs.
(20) Prolactin secretion was stimulated less in incubating hens deprived of their nests for 24 h (nest-deprived) than in laying hens after administration of the 5-HT receptor agonist quipazine, or precursor 5-hydroxytryptophan.
Layabout
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) Nick Offerman, the comic he-man of Parks and Recreation, stars as Ignatius J Reilly, a gluttonous and concupiscent layabout, slothfully adrift in New Orleans.
(2) Hailed by Duncan Smith and rightwing London as the incentive that would propel the unemployed into work, universal credit has become Whitehall's equivalent of a layabout yob: nothing can make it work.
(3) But it’s arguably worse for them because being a member of the idle rich is harder to justify than it used to be and royals can’t hide from public attention easily, as old-school layabouts still can on Benefits Street or Billionaires’ Row.
(4) It was Jane who spotted ability and ambition in the teenage layabout.
(5) I would not mind if the “chirps” were ever actually funny, but most of them remind me of what my children thought were jokes when they were three and the rest are just nasty sniping from overprivileged layabouts.
(6) In order to delegitimise the camp, lots of passersby I met wanted to pigeonhole the protesters as either unrealistic youngsters, or lazy layabouts.
(7) Does it maybe not even just strengthen the protesters' cause, as it reminds us that these aren't layabouts with nothing else to do; many are professionals with jobs to maintain, students with essays to write, or parents with children to care for.
(8) Since it was turned over to the public in May 2010, the site has been immensely popular with families, joggers, rollerbladers, kite-flyers, wind-karters, urban gardeners, yoga enthusiasts, hipsters and layabouts; smoke rises in summer from the abundance of barbecues.
(9) Perhaps caps should be put on inherited wealth in order to avoid these feckless layabouts being tempted to kill innocents for financial gain?
(10) (Layabout sibling Willow was a doddering six-year-old by the time her own acting career began).
(11) Meanwhile, the anti-union Mail, Express and Sun have expressed their honeyed "understanding" for people they would normally castigate as wreckers and layabouts.
(12) He added: "We've got three and a half million layabouts laying about on benefits and I'm 76 getting up at six o'clock in the morning to go to work to keep them."
(13) His story about a society beset by jobless layabouts who opt for unemployment as a lifestyle choice doesn’t just seek to describe a problem, it lays the moral foundations for a whole raft of policies demonising the most vulnerable sections of already deprived communities.
(14) This is not about immigrants, it's not about junkies, it's not about lazy layabouts pretending to be sick and disabled, it's about ordinary people who worked in the steel works, or BHS, or any other business which has failed or been sold off by the government and their super rich cronies.