to lay off
87
3.3
- phrasal verb
- /leɪ ɔf/
:
despedir a
- "There used to be more, but the company laid off half the workforce in 1991.
- lay off workers
- lay off employees
- laid off from a job
Tesla was actually laying off people in their labeling division.
- Tesla was actually laying off people in their labeling division.
- I, I spent when I first started because I got laid off from work.
- I don't know how many millions of people, Amazon's laying off people and all that.
- This meant selling assets, laying off staff, and taking losses on the chin.
- And the letter says that Twitter violated this covenant by laying off a number of staff members.
- Months after Josh, Josh technically got laid off too.
- He worked on a in a plastic warehouse and then he ended up getting laid off.
- And so they're going to have to lay off Mexican workers, which will increase unemployment.
- Companies are closing job openings and companies are freezing hiring or potentially even laying off people like Tesla's laying off folks.
- They're workers that have been laid off or fired or simply unable to make rent or to buy groceries.
- When I start seeing companies with, with big time layoffs and things like that and, and the real I, I was not, I was not gloating over compass laying off people, for example.
- They went from unemployed, laid off during COVID, from pretty good jobs and no money, you know, trying to figure life out.
Examples
-
Mama had just been laid off from her job at Walgreens.
Fiction book (2001) -
But as budgetary pressures continued, the city eventually laid off 29 police officers in 2010.
Academic text (2018) -
I had to lay off two guys myself.
-
Yeah, how all the employees were laid off and people who had paid money for stock, their stock is worth nothing.
-
Thousands of police officers have been laid off since...
-
And what happened is my husband got laid off from a corporate job.
-
My sister's husband was laid off, and things were pretty tight.
Fiction book (2000) -
This meant selling assets, laying off staff, and taking losses on the chin.
-
One manager wept at home nightly when she had to lay off a particularly large number of employees.
Academic text (2005) -
The company had to lay off several employees due to budget cuts.
Synonyms
∞
2.8
To officially make someone leave their job
852
3.8
To stop employing someone so they lose their job
90
5.5
To make someone stop working for a company
70
3.3
To remove someone from their job
37
3.5
To make someone leave their job
11
7.5
To allow someone to leave a job, military duty, or prison for a short time
To remove an employee from a company by completing needed exit tasks
Antonyms
How Severe
Surface Forms
Morphology
lay + off
While 'lay' (to put) + 'off' (away/removed) can suggest removing someone from a role, the specific meaning 'to terminate employment' is a conventionalized, employment‑specific sense and not fully predictable from the parts. The phrase also has other senses (e.g., 'stop bothering someone'), creating ambiguity for a B1 learner who hasn't seen it, so it is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Lay off in the job sense comes from the idea of putting a worker aside from the work: to lay a person off is to move them off the list of people doing the work. That's why lay off now means 'to stop employing someone', often for economic reasons.