What's the past tense of 'belie'?

You probably don’t read a lot of books written in the 1820s. But if you did, you’d see the word “belie” a lot more. According to Google Ngram Viewer, in the early 1800s, “belie” appeared in books about four times as often as it does now.

Maybe that’s why I find the word a little intimidating. I never use it, partly because its definition is confusing, but mostly because its past tense is terrifying.

Today I belie, yesterday I belay? Belaid? Belied? And what about in its -ing form? Beling? Belieing? I never know. That’s ironic when you consider how well-versed I am in the past forms of “lie” and “lay.”  Today I lie, yesterday I lay, in the past I have lain. Today I lay the book on the table, yesterday I laid the book on the table, in the past I have laid the book on the table. I’ve written about “lie” and “lay” so many times I no longer have to look them up.

But for “belie” … well, better to just avoid the word altogether than to botch its past tense. At least, that’s how I’ve been operating. That changes today, starting with some good news for anyone who’s ever struggled to figure out the past form of a verb: Definite answers — not just opinions that amateurs post on the internet — are always handy.

Open any major dictionary, digital or physical, turn to any irregular verb, and the first thing you see after the entry word will tell you how to conjugate it in every form. For example, in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, after the entry for “begin,” you see in bold “began, begun, beginning.”

Dictionaries list the simple past tense, “began,” first, followed by the past participle, “begun.” The easiest way to understand past participles is to think of them as the forms that go with “have”: I have begun. For a lot of verbs, there’s no difference between the past participle and the regular past tense, which is why you say, “I laid the book on the table” and also “I have laid the book on the table.” In those cases, the dictionary lists only the one past form, “laid,” indicating that it serves as both.

For past forms of “belie,” Merriam-Webster’s lists only “belied.” So that’s the past tense, “Her gentleness belied her strength,” and the past participle, “Her gentleness has belied her strength.” Not as difficult as I feared. The progressive participle, “belying,” seems pretty easy now that I realize the obvious: that “belie” is more closely related to the “lie” that means to deceive than to the “lie” that means to recline. And we all know how to conjugate that type of lying: Today I lie, yesterday I lied, in the past I have lied, I am lying. “Belie” mirrors that.

The definition of “belie,” though, is another matter. It’s confusing.

The main definition is to give a false impression of something, as in Merriam’s example “Her gentleness belies her strength.” But the secondary definition is “to show something to be false or wrong,” as in, “The evidence belies their claims of innocence.”

In other words, it can mean to conceal a truth or to reveal a truth.

Some experts disavow this second definition. “The word does not mean ‘to disclose or reveal,’ as is sometimes thought,” writes Garner’s Modern American Usage. “That is, some writers wrongly think of it in a sense almost antithetical to sense 1.”

It’s always unfortunate when a word has a secondary definition that contradicts its main definition. (Read the full dictionary entry for the word “literally” and you’ll see what I mean.) So even though “belie” is easy to put in the past tense, I’ll continue not using it in any tense.

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