offlay
offlay verb: to offset.
Verb
offlay (third-person singular simple present offlays, present participle offlaying, simple past and past participle offlaid)
- To offset.
- The subcontractors themselves outsource work to others in a 'chain of subcontractors' in order further to offlay risks.1993, Professor Scott M Lash, Professor John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space - Page 178
- That seemed to offlay the sense of "the bastards who did this". Quite often there seemed to me to be a sense of failure to protect one's own from the bastards.2000, Dorothy Rowe, Friends and enemies - Page 171
Forms of offlay
| third-person singular present | offlays |
|---|---|
| present participle | offlaying |
| past participle | offlaid |
| past | offlaid |
Origin of offlay
From off- + lay. Possibly from Middle English oflæien (“to offlay; delay”), from Old English ofleċġan (“to lay down; put away; overlay; cover”), from Proto-Germanic *abalagjaną. Compare also Dutch afleggen, German ablegen.
Questions about offlay
- What does offlay mean?
- Offlay means to offset.
- What part of speech is offlay?
- Offlay is a verb.
- What is the past tense of offlay?
- The past tense of offlay is offlaid.
Words near offlay in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: offlay (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “offlay.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/offlay. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.