Word.ws English Dictionary

lait

lait verb: to seek; search for; inquire.

Verb

lait (third-person singular simple present laits, present participle laiting, simple past and past participle laited)

  1. (UK, ambitransitive, dialectal, obsolete) To seek; search for; inquire.
    • By neeght, o' my bed, I laited him, at my sowl luvs : I laited him, but I dudn't find um.1862, Song of Solomon, in Twenty-four English Dialects, page 282 (Westmorland dialect)
    • The other day I heard a girl hailing from the moorlands of Yorkshire remark that she had "laited a long time for the children, but could not find them," evidently meaning she had sought for them. Is this word common to Yorkshire?1877, John Frances, quoting a girl from the moorlands of Yorkshire, Notes and queries, page 10

Proper noun capitalized: Lait

Lait (plural Laits)

  1. A surname from Old Norse.

lait meaning in Tamil

lait in Tamil

பால்

Forms of lait

Verb
third-person singular presentlaits
present participlelaiting
past participlelaited
pastlaited
alternative formlate
Proper noun
pluralLaits

Origin of lait

From Middle English laiten, leiten, from Old Norse leita (“to seek, search, inquire”), from Proto-Germanic *wlaitōną (“to look out, see”), from Proto-Indo-European *wel- (“to see”). Cognate with Norwegian Nynorsk leita (“to search”), Icelandic leita (“to search”), Swedish leta (“to search, hunt, forage”), Old English wlātian (“to gaze, observe, look upon, behold”).

From Old Norse hlað (“pile, stack; barn”), a topographic surname for someone who lived near a barn.

Words formed from lait

Phrases with lait

Questions about lait

What does lait mean?
Lait means to seek; search for; inquire.
What is lait in Tamil?
Lait in Tamil is பால். See Lait meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is lait?
Lait can be a verb or a proper noun.
What is the past tense of lait?
The past tense of lait is laited.

Words near lait in the dictionary

  1. laissez-passer
  2. laissez-passers
  3. Laist
  4. Laisterdyke
  5. Laists
  6. lait
  7. laitakarite
  8. laitance
  9. laitances
  10. laitand
  11. laited

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lait (page history and authors); Lait (page history and authors); lait (Tamil Wiktionary) (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.

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