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Past tense of “lie”

🛌 To be flat on a surface, like on a bed.

Number 89 of 175 by frequency — common in reading and television, less so in your own speech, and three separate forms to keep apart. Recognising it is the priority.

Mistakes people make with “lie”

Not “lied”. Lie does not take -ed — the past simple is lay, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Not “have lay”. After have, has or had the verb switches to its third form: I have lain, never I have lay. This one survives into quite advanced English, so it is worth over-learning.

Do not confuse it with…

The past of lie is lay — which is also the base form of a completely different verb. Lie (lie · lay · lain) is what you do yourself; lay (lay · laid · laid) needs an object: you lay something down. And a third verb, lie meaning to tell an untruth, is regular: lied, lied.

See “lay” →

Phrases you will actually hear

These are worth learning whole. A verb sticks far better inside a phrase somebody would really say than on its own in a table.

The participle goes back to the base

lie · lay · lain. The past simple wanders off on its own, and then the participle returns to the base form and adds -n: lie → lain, with lay having nothing to do with it.

Getting this backwards is the classic slip — building the participle out of the past instead of the base. That -n is the oldest participle ending in English, older than -ed, and it survives on the largest group of verbs on this site.

Either way the ending does the work for you. A form ending in -n needs have, has, had or a passive be in front of it; without one it stands alone as the past — He lay on the grass and watched the clouds.

The same pattern — the -en finishers — runs through 48 verbs: