Word.ws English Dictionary

lig

/lɪɡ/

lig verb: to lie; be in a prostrate or recumbent position.

Verb

lig (third-person singular simple present ligs, present participle ligging, simple past ligged or lag or lay, past participle ligged or lag or lay or laggen or lain)

  1. (Cumbria, Yorkshire, intransitive) To lie; be in a prostrate or recumbent position.
    • His limbes would rest, ne lig in ease embost1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. (Cumbria, Yorkshire, transitive) To lay.
  3. (intransitive, slang) To be a ligger or hanger-on; to freeload.
    • […] but within the confines of the music business it means the pinnacle of a career dedicated to ligging […]1991, Blues & Soul, numbers 589-601, page 32

Noun

lig (plural ligs)

  1. (UK, obsolete, slang) A lie; an untruth.
    • And the Muse of Arts that never told a lig, / Whirls in her mid-air flight to sing of Twigg; […]1867, James Torrington Spencer Lidstone, The Fourteenth Londoniad, page 85

Forms of lig

Verb
third-person singular presentligs
present participleligging
pastligged
pastlag
pastlay
past participleligged
past participlelag
past participlelay
past participlelaggen
past participlelain
Noun
pluralligs

Past tense of lig: ligged or lag

Origin of lig

From Middle English liggen, from Old English liċġan (“to lie, be situated, be at rest, remain”) and Old Norse liggja (“to lie”). More at lie.

Probably from Middle English *ligge, from Old Norse lygi (“a lie”), from Proto-Germanic *lugį̄ (“lie, falsehood”). Cognate with Old English lyġe and lyġen.

Words formed from lig

  • lig down
  • lig on
  • lig out

Phrases with lig

Words that rhyme with lig

25 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about lig

What does lig mean?
Lig means to lie; be in a prostrate or recumbent position.
What part of speech is lig?
Lig can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce lig?
Lig is pronounced /lɪɡ/.
What is the past tense of lig?
The past tense of lig is ligged.

Words near lig in the dictionary

  1. lifts up
  2. liftshaft
  3. liftshafts
  4. liftup
  5. liftups
  6. lig
  7. lig.
  8. LIG4 syndrome
  9. LIGA
  10. ligable
  11. LIGAF

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lig (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-lig.wav.

Cite this entry: “lig.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lig. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.