Word.ws English Dictionary

lay about

lay about verb: to strike blows in all directions.

Verb

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

  1. To strike blows in all directions.
    • [...] At beating quarters up, or forage, / Behaved herself with matchless courage; / And laid about in fight more busily / Than th' Amazonian Dame Penthesile.1663, Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part 1, canto 2
    • Alone he could have sprung into the midst of that close-packed mob, and, laying about him after the fashion of Numa, the lion, have struck the Arabs with such consternation that escape would have been easy.1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantine Books, published 1963, page 63
  2. To set about, with infinitive or gerund.
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see lay, about.

Forms of lay about

third-person singular presentlays about
present participlelaying about
past participlelaid about
pastlaid about

Questions about lay about

What does lay about mean?
Lay about means to strike blows in all directions.
What part of speech is lay about?
Lay about is a verb.
What is the past tense of lay about?
The past tense of lay about is laid about.

Words near lay about in the dictionary

  1. lay a foundation
  2. lay a glove on
  3. lay a hand on
  4. lay a trip on
  5. lay a venue
  6. lay about
  7. lay above
  8. lay ahead
  9. lay along
  10. lay an anchor to the windward
  11. lay an egg

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lay about (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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