laying

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle of lay.

   The crew was laying track across the valley when the funding ran out.

   She is laying the table for the evening's guests.

   Note

   The -ing form of a verb that always takes an object: you are laying track, laying eggs, laying a plan, laying odds that something will happen. That object is the quickest test against lying, the participle of intransitive lie, because a person lying down has nothing to set down. As a gerund the same spelling slides into the noun for the act itself, as in the laying of foundations.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of laying something in any sense of the verb, such as putting down a carpet, placing a wreath, or producing eggs.

   The laying of the carpet had to be redone after the measurements proved wrong.

   A ceremony accompanied the laying of the wreath at the memorial.

   Similarplacement, placing

   Note

   A noun of action that can also be counted. With of it names a single act, such as the laying of a cornerstone or of a wreath. In the plural it names the separate occasions themselves. Poultry World in 1882 warned that a hen's later layings, her successive batches of eggs, would not hatch average good chickens.

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