lay down one's life
lay down one's life verb: to give one's life, to die.
Verb
lay down one's life (third-person singular simple present lays down one's life, present participle laying down one's life, simple past and past participle laid down one's life)
- To give one's life, to die.
- Gold was there, and get at it they would, and at any cost. Many of our fellow-passengers suffered a rude awakening, and more than one man laid down his life in the quest for gold that had taken so fierce a hold upon him.1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 142
- Only history can tell us where China will go from here. The Chinese leadership's brutal crackdown on students seeking fundamental democratic rights makes it difficult to chart the future. Those brave students who laid down their lives against the tanks of Tiananmen Square confirmed what I'd always...1990, Ronald Reagan, An American Life, Pocket Books, →ISBN, pages 372–373
Forms of lay down one's life
| third-person singular present | lays down one's life |
|---|---|
| present participle | laying down one's life |
| past participle | laid down one's life |
| past | laid down one's life |
Questions about lay down one's life
- What does lay down one's life mean?
- Lay down one's life means to give one's life, to die.
- What part of speech is lay down one's life?
- Lay down one's life is a verb.
- What is the past tense of lay down one's life?
- The past tense of lay down one's life is laid down one's life.
Words near lay down one's life in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: lay down one's life (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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