Word.ws English Dictionary

lay one's tongue to

lay one's tongue to verb: to say; to name; to think of to say.

Verb

lay one's tongue to (third-person singular simple present lays one's tongue to, present participle laying one's tongue to, simple past and past participle laid one's tongue to)

  1. (dated, idiomatic, slang) To say; to name; to think of to say.
    • Mr Lightwood, I will now name to you, that on behalf of the poor dear boy, me and Mrs Boffin have stood out against the old man times out of number, till he has called us every name he could lay his tongue to.1864 May – 1865 November, Charles Dickens, chapter 8, in Our Mutual Friend. […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1865, →OCLC
    • He’s been dabbling in every sort of fool thing you can lay your tongue to,—wild-cat stocks, patent-rights, land speculations, oil claims,—till he’s run through about everything.1885, William Dean Howells, chapter 20, in The Rise of Silas Lapham

Forms of lay one's tongue to

third-person singular presentlays one's tongue to
present participlelaying one's tongue to
past participlelaid one's tongue to
pastlaid one's tongue to

Questions about lay one's tongue to

What does lay one's tongue to mean?
Lay one's tongue to means to say; to name; to think of to say.
What part of speech is lay one's tongue to?
Lay one's tongue to is a verb.
What is the past tense of lay one's tongue to?
The past tense of lay one's tongue to is laid one's tongue to.

Words near lay one's tongue to in the dictionary

  1. lay one's account
  2. lay one's cards on the table
  3. lay one's eyes on
  4. lay one's hands on
  5. lay one's head
  6. lay one's tongue to
  7. lay open
  8. lay out
  9. lay over
  10. lay people
  11. lay person

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lay one's tongue to (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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