Word.ws English Dictionary

laying bare

laying bare is the present participle and gerund 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 laying bare

What is laying bare the present participle and gerund of?
Laying bare is the present participle and gerund of lay bare.

Words near laying bare in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: laying 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.

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