How to Use lay in a Sentence

lay

1 of 2 noun
  • Get a lay of the land aboard the town’s free gondola, which lifts riders 1,750 feet above the valley floor.
    — Ryan Haase, WSJ, 13 May 2021
  • Being able to rack up the miles and get a lay of your surroundings is a treat for every runner.
    — Chris Hachey, BGR, 25 June 2021
  • So number one, get a lay of the land; understand the county, state and local taxes.
    — CBS News, 29 Apr. 2022
  • To give you a better lay of the land, here’s a list of some of the Hollywood Hills' most desirable neighborhoods.
    — Spencer Elliott, Forbes, 12 Aug. 2022
  • This will be the only invitational race run on the 5K course this fall, and several of the top teams are showing up to get a lay of the land.
    — Ethan Fuller, BostonGlobe.com, 7 Oct. 2022
  • But, as always, remember polls come with a margin of error, and in many 2022 elections, there are still too few polls to show a clear lay of the land.
    — Byrick Klein,averi Harper, ABC News, 22 Mar. 2022
  • Only a person with the confidence of a woman who has just had a good lay could attempt and succeed at such a feat.
    — Maggie Fremont, Vulture, 20 July 2021
  • Shepherd gives me the lay of the clubland, explaining that there are three unique stages, each with its own sonic identity.
    — Cassidy George, Rolling Stone, 22 Feb. 2023
  • Read on for a lay of the land at one of the best national parks in the U.S., including nearby sights worth seeing and pro tips for enjoying all Bryce Canyon has to offer.
    — Maya Silver, Condé Nast Traveler, 9 Mar. 2023
  • The best holes ask the golfer to do this in unique and creative ways, using the natural lay of the land to provide the bones for the strategy and then allowing the architect to provide the flesh in the features.
    — Joe Passov, WSJ, 15 June 2022
  • Lee seemed unsure of himself with his first lay and caused a broken down play that was salvaged by their backup big Bismack Biyombo.
    — Dana Scott, The Arizona Republic, 20 Jan. 2023
  • Before using each mop, the testers read its corresponding instruction manual to get a full lay of the land.
    — Rebecca Norris, Peoplemag, 10 Feb. 2023
  • Be sure to include specific lot line dimensions, with boundaries drawn into aerial photographs an excellent way to highlight the lay of your land.
    — Bill Jordan, Dallas News, 27 June 2021
  • Andrew went back to his bishop with this information, but the lay leader never reported that information to church authorities.
    — Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune, 3 Aug. 2023
  • Musk also claims that Twitter violated an agreement to operate its business normally ahead of the merger by letting go of two executives and announcing lay-offs of a portion of its recruiting team.
    — Clare Duffy, CNN, 15 July 2022
  • Brown’s book features denser historical digressions, whereas Jacobs’s is a bit lighter, but both women expound upon the political lay of the land and the complicated relationship Gibson had with the Black community.
    — Patrick Sauer, Washington Post, 23 Aug. 2023

lay

2 of 2 adjective
  • The agency says the tests should be easy enough for a lay person to use and interpret at home.
    — Brianna Abbott, WSJ, 14 Dec. 2020
  • The lay Catholic movement practices the Gospel in the way of its late founder, Dorothy Day: a devotion to helping the poor and marginalized.
    — Los Angeles Times, 21 Nov. 2021
  • For the purposes of lay persons, what does a variant mean?
    — Donna M. Owens, Essence, 14 July 2021
  • Kim Connor, a lay leader at the church, has been a member of the congregation for 25 years.
    — Dallas News, 4 Apr. 2021
  • In lay terms, Eric can't move anything from the bottom of his pectoral muscles down.
    — cincinnati.com, 11 Aug. 2022
  • This is suspected by one of the lay sisters in the convent, so Gertrude and Egidio murder the woman and bury her somewhere nearby.
    — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 10 Oct. 2022
  • Do, a lay leader and head of the diocese’s Vietnamese committee, fled Vietnam as a teenager in 1975.
    — San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 June 2022
  • But for a lay person who's not a lawyer, what are the constraints, in your view, on your upcoming testimony?
    — CBS News, 23 Apr. 2023
  • The story sees Pearce portray a lay preacher who arrives at a British settlement in 1830s New Zealand.
    — Patrick Frater, Variety, 6 May 2022
  • They were replaced by lay staff who expect better pay and benefits.
    — Los Angeles Times, 3 Jan. 2021
  • Bishops are called to their lay role on a temporary basis, typically for around five years.
    — Kim Raff, ProPublica, 2 Dec. 2021
  • Then Thompson Powell decided to go to seminary to become a lay leader at a church.
    — Myrna Petlicki, chicagotribune.com, 24 Aug. 2021
  • In lay terms, what this means is that people who deposited money with Celsius to reap its famously high returns can’t, for the time being, get it out.
    — Steven Zeitchik, Washington Post, 13 June 2022
  • According to the church’s constitution, a lay vote is held to select the top three bishops and then the Holy Synod holds its own secret ballot to elect the new archbishop.
    — Arkansas Online, 25 Dec. 2022
  • For this reason, the new hot trend is 4-wheelers with built in organization, but many of these still go with the lay flat orientation that makes little sense.
    — Larry Olmsted, Forbes, 10 Nov. 2022
  • For the benefit of the lay people in the audience, Ma provided a handy definition of what exactly Web3 is.
    — Naman Ramachandran, Variety, 15 Mar. 2023
  • Some of his greatest feats may not even register with lay listeners, even as a vague intimation or emotion.
    — New York Times, 11 Mar. 2021
  • The lay leader of the local congregation confirmed Wednesday that Robertson lived alone within his ward boundaries.
    — Kolbie Peterson, The Salt Lake Tribune, 9 Aug. 2023
  • Who writes especially well about science for a lay audience?
    — New York Times, 9 Mar. 2023
  • More than half of the country’s 27 Jesuit colleges and universities are now run by lay presidents, several of them women.
    — Emily Bobrow, WSJ, 15 July 2022
  • The group, which consists of lay members from a variety of fields, a Catholic pastor and a religious sister, approved Demek’s reinstatement last week.
    — Jonathan M. Pitts, Baltimore Sun, 5 Apr. 2022
  • Sign up Indoor air quality, or IAQ, by contrast, has been overlooked by researchers, policymakers, and the lay public alike.
    — Eleanor Cummins, The New Republic, 19 June 2023
  • The therapist worked as a plot engine, because everyone’s lay idea of therapy is having a problem and addressing it and solving it, which hews really well to the format of a sitcom.
    — The New Yorker, 12 July 2023
  • The authors, a leading group of specialists, have inspired a series of articles in the lay press warning of problems created by taking Paxlovid at the same time as a long list of medications for heart conditions or blood clots.
    — Kent Sepkowitz, CNN, 17 Oct. 2022
  • Shaw delivers the rest of this story as an omniscient narrator, deftly moving from scene to scene and, along the way, helpfully explaining production jargon for a lay audience.
    — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 2 May 2023
  • Published in 1953, the Morgans’ book would be assigned to generations of undergraduate and graduate students and widely read by a lay audience.
    — William Hogeland, The New Republic, 25 Jan. 2021
  • Hardly the people’s favorite and trailing the two frontrunners in the lay vote, Chrysostomos outmaneuvered his rivals by clinching majority support within the college to win.
    — Menelaos Hadjicostis, ajc, 7 Nov. 2022
  • Who writes especially well about philosophy for a lay audience?
    — New York Times, 30 Mar. 2023
  • Conventional wisdom holds that the most enticing way to introduce architecture to a lay audience is through the human element that animates this most social of all art forms.
    — Martin Filler, The New York Review of Books, 11 Feb. 2021
  • In their place, however, were an explosion in lay ministries, from parish administrators to altar girls to extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist.
    — David Briggs, cleveland, 21 Sep. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lay.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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