
The German verb legen mean to lay/ put/ place. It gets conjugated as follows:
- ich lege
- du legst
- er/ sie/ es legt
- wir legen
- ihr legt
- sie/ Sie legen
The perfect tense goes with ‘haben’ and the past participle is ‘gelegt’, and in the imperfect tense it’s ‘ich legte’.
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But there are lots of prefixes which change the meaning. These verbs can have a variety of meanings and a lot depends on the contents of the sentence, although they all somehow mean to put, lay or place something somewhere. I tried to give you some simple translations but here are three sample sentences to show you some differences just for the second verb in the list.
Ich möchte Geld anlegen.
I’d like to invest money.

Er musste einen Verband anlegen.
He had to apply a bandage.

Sie legte ein Facebook-Konto an.
She created a Facebook account.

Grammatically, though, you don’t need to worry as the following verbs are separable verbs, which means the past participle has the ‘ge’ between the prefix and the verb, e.g. beigelegt, hingelegt, losgelegt…
- ablegen – to file/ tp discard
- anlegen – to invest/ to attach/ to create
- auflegen – to hang up/ to publish sth
- auslegen – to disburse/ to lay st out
- beilegen – to enclose
- bloßlegen – to lay bare
- darauflegen – tp lay sth on it
- darlegen – to state/ sum up
- dazulegen – to add to
- einlegen – to insert/ to file
- festlegen – to determine/ specify
- freilegen – to lay open
- hinlegen – to lay down
- hinterlegen – to deposit
- hinzulegen – to add
- lahmlegen – to paralyze/ cripple sth
- loslegen – to set off
- reinlegen – to hoodwink so
- stilllegen – to shut sth down
- umlegen – to relocate/ collocquially also to kill sb
- vorlegen – to submit
- weglegen – to put away
- zurechtlegen – to arrange sth
- zurücklegen – to put sth back, aside
- zusammenlegen – to fold
The following verbs are inseparable, which means that you don’t need a ‘ge’ at the beginning of the past participle, just use the past participle of ‘legen’ with the prefix, like erlegt, überlegt, verlegt, zerlegt.
- erlegen – to succumb/ to kill (an animal)
- überlegen – to reflect/ consider
- verlegen – to relocate
- zerlegen – to dismantle
Phew, that was a long list of verbs. Ich muss mich langlegen 😉

What can you do with these words to remember them?
You can bookmark this post or make a vocabulary list with them. You can do that with any paper or electronic notebook. Or you could buy my notebook which I designed specially for German vocab learners. It has space for vocabulary lists and sentences – very important for these verbs as they change their meaning depending on the sentence! You can even choose one of two colours ☺

If you want to know about German verb conjugation in the present tense, check out my online course German tenses 1 – the present tense (Use coupon code BLOGPOST to get 10% off)