Let’s talk about lay versus lie.

In a lot of places that discuss grammar–even a lot of places that normally discuss it from the perspective of “if enough people use it, it’s correct usage”–you will find advice that says it’s important to make the “correct” choice between the verbs “lay” and “lie”. There is a rule, there is a right way and a wrong way, there is a normative practice, and you should not depart from it.

I’m going to take a slightly different approach.

Depending on your dialect of English, you may be more or less likely to say, for example, “I need to lay down” rather than “I need to lie down”. Southern US English is probably most given to the first phrasing, followed by other US dialects, but both versions are used in all English dialects that I’m aware of. The first version also tends to be most often used by people with less education or from a lower socio-economic class (though, again, educated people from the southern US are more likely to use it than educated people from elsewhere).

And the thing with writing about language and usage is that it’s generally educated people from a middle-class-or-higher background who do it, and, no matter how hard we try, humans generally think of what they’ve grown up doing as “correct” and “right,” and things that people less fortunate than themselves do differently as “wrong” and “lesser”. There is more than that going on with “lay/lie,” as I’ll discuss below, but don’t for a moment think that that isn’t part of what is going on.

What I’m going to do is this. I will describe what is usually considered the “correct” usage. It’s what I use myself–I’m an educated speaker of New Zealand English, who grew up in a first-generation middle-class household (both my parents were schoolteachers, but their families of origin were tradespeople and manual workers for many generations back). But then I’ll talk about when you might want to use the “incorrect” version–and when you maybe might not want to, even if that’s how you usually talk.

A likely part of the reason people sometimes use “lay” where strict usage would prescribe “lie” is that the present tense form of one is the past tense form of the other:

Verb	Present Tense	Past Tense
Lie	I lie on the bed	I lay on the bed
Lay	I lay my money down	I laid my money down

You can see how that would be confusing.

The distinction is that lie means adopt a reclining position, and it doesn’t require an object. Lay, on the other hand, means place, and it does require an object. You could substitute as follows:

Verb	Present Tense	Past Tense
Recline	I recline on the bed	I reclined on the bed
Lay	I place my money down	I placed my money down

That’s straightforward, because “recline” and “place” are both what is known as “regular verbs”; they generate a past tense by adding “-ed” at the end (or actually, since both of them already have the “e”, by adding “d”). And, of course, they sound nothing alike.

“Lay” is also a regular verb; the past tense is “laid” (though it does require a spelling change, not just an “-ed” ending). But “lie” is an irregular verb, which changes to the past tense by changing its vowel–and in doing so, it becomes a word that is spelled, and also sounds, exactly like the present tense of “lay”.

Probably not helping is the fact that there is a different verb, meaning “to deliberately say something untrue,” which is also “lie” in the present tense, but is “lied” in the past tense.

And to complicate things further, American English is more inclined to form plurals regularly (with “-ed”), given the option, whereas British English and other associated dialects are more likely to stick with the irregular form that uses the vowel change.

Think about “shined” and “shone”. Both are correct past tenses of “shine,” and both are used in American English in sentences like “he shined/shone a light on it”. I’ve even seen a US writer use both forms, in exactly the same context, in consecutive sentences; presumably he couldn’t make up his mind and ended up having a dollar each way. (Don’t do this, by the way. Be consistent.)

British English, on the other hand, favours “shone” except in the specialized sense of “polished” (“he shined his shoes”). If you’re an American writing British characters, one thing to be aware of is that where an irregular form of the verb is available, the British will usually use it. Also, US English is more likely than British English to use a past tense form of the verb that is the same as the present tense form. For example, a British person will say “I spit” for present tense and “I spat” for past, but a US speaker may say “I spit” for both–and again, this is probably more likely if they are from the south and/or have a lower level of education.

All of this creates a perfect storm of reasons why people might say “I laid down on the bed”.

Nor does it stop there. Let’s extend our table:

Verb	Present Tense	Past Tense	Present Participle	Past Participle
Lie	I lie on the bed	I lay on the bed	I am lying on the bed	I had lain on the bed
Lay	I lay my money down	I laid my money down	I am laying my money down	I had laid my money down

People who say “I laid on the bed” are also likely to say “I am laying on the bed” and “I had laid on the bed”.

I would like to propose to you that people who use “lay” in place of “lie” are engaging in a dialectic variation. They are using it consistently, they are declining it consistently (the various tenses follow the same pattern as the “standard” usage of “lay”); they are simply substituting one verb for another similar verb. Whether this started as a mistake or a confusion is not really the point. It’s how they talk, and it’s no more “incorrect”–for them–than using “spit” as both present and past tense is for people who do that (who are often the same people).

And this is not a new thing, either. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s note on usage:

Lay has been used intransitively in the sense of “lie”  going to lay down for a quick nap  since the 14th century. The practice was unremarked until around 1770; attempts to correct it have been a fixture of schoolbooks ever since. Generations of teachers and critics have succeeded in taming most literary and learned writing, but intransitive lay persists in familiar speech and is a bit more common in general prose than one might suspect. Much of the problem lies in the confusing similarity of the principal parts of the two words… Some commentators are ready to abandon the distinction, suggesting that lay is on the rise socially. But if it does rise to respectability, it is sure to do so slowly: many people have invested effort in learning to keep lie and lay distinct. Remember that even though many people do use lay for lie, others will judge you unfavorably if you do.

Let’s see, can we think of a major English-speaking nation that was colonized largely before 1770? Hmmm.

The really important part of the paragraph I just quoted, however, and what I want to zero in on, is not whether the lay/lie distinction is in any sense objectively “correct English,” because there’s no such thing; language changes, it’s changed by its speakers’ usage changing, and English in particular has no gatekeeping body like the Académie Française that issues official pronouncements about the language (not that most French people probably take much notice of their one in any case).

The first important thing to note about conventions like this–because it is a convention–is that some people will notice if you break them, and that will distract them from your story. This is what my whole book is about–learning the conventions so that, by following them, you will cause your mechanics and usage to recede into the background and not be noticed in a negative way by your readers.

The other important thing to note is that the use, or non-use, of a convention like this locates you in a particular part of the dialect space of English. It’s a wide and generous space, which takes in English as it is spoken in Scotland, Ireland, India, Singapore, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand as well as in England and the US, and within those locations there are sometimes regional variations, and very often variations based on social class. The reason I mention this is that if you are, say, an American author writing a steampunk story set in 19th-century London, there are many readers who will get distracted if you substitute “lay” for “lie,” because that’s not authentic to the dialect of the people you are writing about (however much it may be authentic to your dialect).

To use an analogy, if I am describing a US or British farmer in fiction, I won’t put him in a Swanndri, which is a specific brand of heavy bush shirt made from wool in a tartan pattern, and worn almost universally by New Zealand farmers. It’s part of my mental image of “farmer,” because I grew up in New Zealand, but it would be a mistake to place it anywhere else; farmers outside New Zealand seldom if ever wear Swanndris.

Likewise, if you are setting your story in London and use words and phrases like “sidewalk” (rather than “pavement”), “a few blocks away,” “gotten” (rather than “got”), “she wrote him” (rather than “wrote to him”), “he can come stay” (rather than “come and stay” or “come to stay”), “different than” (rather than “different from”) or “off of” (rather than “off”), people who are familiar with the differences between US and British English will be distracted, and their immersion in your story will be broken. My immersion was broken, for example, reading Tim Powers’ Declare, in which the Cambridge-educated, very British viewpoint character constantly says “off of” and occasionally says “sure”. If you care about your readers’ immersion at all, it’s worth finding someone who speaks the dialect in question and asking them to go over your manuscript (it would be best to offer to pay them for this, or exchange a similar favour) and point out moments where your dialect is obtrusive.

I have been married to an American for more than 20 years, and have a degree in English language, and I still asked a colleague on a writers’ forum to check over the parts of one of my books that are written from the point of view of a woman from Boston. (My wife is from California, which is a somewhat different dialect.) I got some things wrong, too, which my colleague pointed out. For example, I had my character say “hands up who thinks that…” and he suggested substituting “show of hands, who thinks that…,” since “hands up” in the US is associated with being threatened with a gun, not with indicating your vote.

On the other hand, you maybe don’t want to try too hard to write a strong dialect you don’t personally speak, either. I’m thinking of the absolutely terrible job I saw the well-known SFF author Ann McCaffrey do with two Australian characters, and the equally bad job another author did with my own dialect, New Zealand English, in one of the few stories I’ve seen with a New Zealand character that wasn’t by a New Zealand author. What tends to happen is that someone who doesn’t speak the dialect will pull out a few phrases (often ones that are already old-fashioned) that they’ve heard somehow, and ram them together in a way that, to a native speaker, seems completely artificial and false–and heavy-handed; most people who speak English speak it with a touch of dialect here and there, rather than in a series of dialect phrases piled on top of one another. A heavy dialect draws attention to itself, and it’s most likely that you don’t want the reader’s attention on how well or badly you’ve done the dialect; you want it to be on what the character is saying and how that contributes to your story. Less is more, with dialect as with so much else. 

I’ve strayed a little way from “lie” vs “lay,” but it’s in service of my main point, which is: I consider the use of “lay” in place of “lie” to be a legitimate dialectal variation, but it’s important that you’re aware of it as such, and use the two verbs in your writing in a way that works for the story you’re telling and its intended audience. The same is true of other dialectal variations.

I once had an argument with an author acquaintance on social media whose particular dialect included usages like “that needs changed,” where other dialects would use “that needs changing” or “that needs to be changed”. This is originally an Irish or Scots usage, but is also used in parts of the US settled from Ireland or Scotland, including, presumably, the part she came from. I have heard it from speakers in New Zealand who come from Southland, another region settled primarily by Scots, as well.

I suggested, when I saw it in her fiction, that because it was a dialect usage, she might want to use the more “standard US English” versions instead. She responded, with some annoyance, that there was no such thing as “standard US English,” which is technically correct–I’d phrased it poorly–but also missed my point. In supposed-to-be-neutral third-person narration, or in the narrative voice or dialog of someone who didn’t come from the part of the US she came from, that minority-dialect usage stands out, and not in a good way.

You should go right ahead and speak your own dialect all you want; as long as they can understand you, that’s nobody else’s business. But be aware of it, especially when writing, and be aware of how it will sound to others, and of whether it will give them a smoother or bumpier reading experience.