Past Tense of “mislay”
The past tense of mislay is mislaid; the past participle is mislaid.
Why “mislay” behaves this way
"Mislay" joins "mis-" to "lay," the causative counterpart of "lie" (to lay something down versus to lie down oneself), from Old English "lecgan." "Lay" has always been a weak, i.e. dental-suffix, verb rather than a true ablaut strong verb, producing "laid" by a regular but old sound-shortening pattern, and "mislay" inherits that "laid" form directly. "Lecgan" itself was originally formed as a causative derivative of "licgan" (to lie), a productive Old English word-formation pattern where a related but distinct verb was built specifically to mean "cause X to happen" rather than "X happens on its own."
"Mislay" carries a distinctly gentler, more genteel connotation than its closest synonym "lose" — to "mislay" your keys implies they're still somewhere nearby, temporarily misplaced rather than genuinely gone, a nuance that has kept the word alive in everyday British and American speech even though "lose" would work in nearly the same contexts.
The common confusion
The confusion many learners run into isn't really with "mislay" itself but with the underlying pair it's built on — knowing that its parent verb always needs something to act on, unlike its frequently-confused near-twin "lie," and that "mislay" inherits only that object-requiring half of the pair, never the other. Because "mislay" is unambiguously transitive in every context it appears in, it's actually one of the easier places to practice the lay/lie distinction, since there's no tempting intransitive use to confuse it with. Once a learner masters "mislay," the same logic transfers cleanly back to the trickier plain verb "lay" on its own.
How it's actually used
"Mislay" is used almost exclusively for small, everyday physical objects — keys, glasses, a phone, a letter — and rarely for anything abstract or large, reflecting its core meaning of temporarily and often carelessly putting something down in the wrong place rather than losing it in any deeper sense. British English uses "mislay" noticeably more often in daily conversation than American English, where speakers more commonly default to the plainer "lose" or "can't find" even when the situation is really about a misplaced rather than truly lost item.
Across the tense system
"Mislaid" does the work of two forms at once, standing in for the simple past and the past participle alike, exactly as its parent verb "laid" does — "she mislaid her glasses" and "she has mislaid her glasses again" differ only by which auxiliary comes before it. The repeated-action perfect ("has mislaid... again") is an especially common pattern with this verb, since "mislay" so often describes a recurring, everyday habit rather than a single isolated event.
Common real mistakes
The most common error is confusing "mislay" with "mislie," which doesn't exist as a standard verb at all — because the underlying verb here is "lay," not "lie," and "lay" always needs a direct object, a sentence like "the keys mislaid" (with no object) is ungrammatical; it should be "the keys were mislaid" in the passive voice instead. This is exactly the same lay/lie confusion that plagues the base verb on its own, just carried over into the prefixed form, so anyone comfortable with plain "lay" versus "lie" will find "mislay" follows the identical logic.
Examples
- She mislaid her reading glasses somewhere in the house again.
- He has mislaid his keys at least three times this month.
- They mislaid the original contract before the meeting.
- I mislaid my phone somewhere between the kitchen and the car.
- The invitation was mislaid and never made it to the guest list.
- We had mislaid the receipt by the time we needed to return the item.
- Grandpa is always mislaying his hat around the house.
Memory trick
Keep "mislay" tied to "lay," not "lie" — you always mislay something (an object), the same way you always lay something down, never lie it down. Picture a set of keys temporarily lost in a couch cushion, not permanently gone, to capture the word's gentler shade of meaning compared to "lose." If a sentence names an object being put in the wrong spot, "mislay" fits; if nothing is named as the object, it doesn't belong there at all.