“Lie in bed” or “lay in bed” in English

Lie, lay, lied, laid, layed... Does it even matter? We understand each other anyway, right? In fact, it does matter. Using an incorrect form increases the risk of misunderstanding at best, and it may make you sound uneducated.

The difference between “lie” and “lay” is actually not so hard to understand:

Do you see the difference? You can only lay something (including eggs, if you are a hen), but you cannot lie it, and something can lie somewhere, but it cannot lay there. A couple of examples:

The same rule applies in the present progressive tense:

The second sentence would traditionally be considered incorrect, unless you are about to lay an egg. Using “lay” like this is becoming fairly common in spoken American English, but it is still considered inappropriate in writing, and if you are a non-native speaker, it's better to avoid it altogether.

Conversely, if you are laying something, you cannot use “lying”:

Here, of course, we are ignoring the third, unrelated meaning of the verb “lie”, which is:

but I believe it is safe to assume that no one will confuse “lay” with “not to tell the truth”.

The confusing past tense

Here's where things get a little complicated. The past tense of “lay” is “laid”, so no problem there, but the past tense of “lie” (in the sense of “being in a certain position”) is “lay”. Wait... what?

For some obscure reason, the past tense of “lie” is exactly the same word with which it gets confused in the present tense:

(Note that although some people spell “laid” as “layed”, this spelling is generally considered to be an error.) You can clearly recognize the difference in the third person singular:

To make matters even worse, when the word means “to tell something untrue”, the past tense of “lie” is “lied”, not “lay”:

Going back to our original example with “lying in bed”:

I'll leave the interpretation of the second sentence to your imagination.

The past participle

The torture does not end here. We still haven't covered one case: the past participle (aka “the third form” of a verb), which we need in order to form the present perfect. The participles are:

Fortunately, using the present perfect of these three verbs is relatively uncommon. Here are a few examples:

Summary

Let's finish with a few more examples of all the forms mentioned above: