lay off
"lay-off" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“lay off” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 7
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - (of an employer) To dismiss (workers) from employment, e.g. at a time of low business volume or through no fault of the worker, often with a severance package.
Corpus desk
Index EN-lay-off · lay off · English
lay off · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 7 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "L" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lay off |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 7 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “lay off” in English
Rare enough to double-check
lay off is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 6 senses are on record.
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for lay off, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. Our dataset records no confusable match here, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is lay off, spelled L-A-Y- -O-F-F.
Definition
- 1(of an employer) To dismiss (workers) from employment, e.g. at a time of low business volume or through no fault of the worker, often with a severance package.
- 2To place all or part of a bet with another bookmaker in order to reduce risk.
- 3To cease, quit, stop (doing something).
- 4To stop bothering, teasing, or pestering someone; to leave (someone) alone.
- 5In painting, to apply gentle strokes to smooth a wet coat of paint so as to remove visible roller- or brush-marks, commonly using a dry brush; a similar technique, but using a loaded laying-off brush, may produce a smooth coat of paint when using a roller or the usual brush techniques would leave marks.
- 6To plan out (a navigational course) using a chart.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how lay off appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Lay off the singing, will you! I'm trying to study.
When are you gonna lay off smoking?
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.