Adjective: lay
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more lay |
| Superlative | most lay |
Sample Sentences
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They seemed more lay than clerical.
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a lay preacher; a lay brother
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It is true that in adopting the short view many of the younger economists have not merely taken over the lay notions bodily. [1958, Jacob Viner, The Long View and the Short, page 112:]
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He hasn't caught a mouse since he was a slip of a kitten. Except when eating, he does nothing but sleep. […] It's a sort of disease. There's a scientific name for it. Trau- something. Traumatic symplegia, that's it. This cat has traumatic symplegia. In other words, putting it in simple language adapted to the lay mind, where other cats are content to get their eight hours, Augustus wants his twenty-four. [1960, P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, chapter VII:]
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In what could become a model program for courses across the U.S., this state's gay health consultant has begun training bartenders and bar owners as lay health educators. [1985 February 2, John Zeh, “Sex Ed In Bars”, in Gay Community News, volume 12, number 28, page 16:]
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a lay suit
Adjectives inflected like lay
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English lay, from Old French lai, from Latin lāicus, from Ancient Greek λαϊκός (laïkós). Doublet of laic. See: Latin Adjectives '
lāicus'.