Word.ws English Dictionary

lie at someone's door

lie at someone's door verb: to be the fault or responsibility of someone.

Verb

lie at someone's door (third-person singular simple present lies at someone's door, present participle lying at someone's door, simple past lay at someone's door, past participle lain at someone's door)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To be the fault or responsibility of someone.
    • Appointed foreign minister in 2004, he has since then through successive US administrations developed a Putinesque revulsion for all western ideas, if not all western consumer durables. At one point, he said all the ills of the 20th century colonialism, two world wars and the cold war lay at the...2022 November 15, Patrick Wintour, “Sergei Lavrov, a fixture of Russian diplomacy facing his toughest test in Ukraine”, in The Guardian

Forms of lie at someone's door

third-person singular presentlies at someone's door
present participlelying at someone's door
pastlay at someone's door
past participlelain at someone's door

Origin of lie at someone's door

Compare lay at someone's door.

Questions about lie at someone's door

What does lie at someone's door mean?
Lie at someone's door means to be the fault or responsibility of someone.
What part of speech is lie at someone's door?
Lie at someone's door is a verb.
What is the past tense of lie at someone's door?
The past tense of lie at someone's door is lay at someone's door.

Words near lie at someone's door in the dictionary

  1. Lie algebroid
  2. Lie algebroids
  3. lie along
  4. lie around
  5. lie at one's door
  6. lie at someone's door
  7. lie at someone's heart
  8. lie back
  9. lie back and think of England
  10. lie before
  11. lie behind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lie at someone's door (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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