Word.ws English Dictionary

laid bare

laid bare is the simple past and past participle of lay bare.

Meaning of lay bare

Verb

lay bare (third-person singular simple present lays bare, present participle laying bare, simple past and past participle laid bare)

  1. To make bare; strip.
    • And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer's rain—1816, Lord Byron, “Canto III”, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Canto the Third, London: […] [F]or John Murray, […], →OCLC, stanza LVIII, page 34
    Synonyms:
    crack, open, unseal
  2. (figuratively) To expose to view, reveal, uncover.
    • The central and centralized, imperial governments, guided by the big interests of the country, induced in their unfortunate subjects this last pestilential epidemic of military mania by means of a persistent course of direct and indirect suggestion in which the conditions of normal and abnormal...1919, Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress
    Synonyms:
    nake

Questions about laid bare

What is laid bare the simple past and past participle of?
Laid bare is the simple past and past participle of lay bare.

Words near laid bare in the dictionary

  1. laid an egg
  2. laid aside
  3. laid at someone's door
  4. laid away
  5. laid back
  6. laid bare
  7. laid behind
  8. laid by
  9. laid by the heels
  10. laid chilly
  11. laid claim

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: laid bare (page history and authors); lay bare (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “laid bare.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/laid_bare. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.