offlay
To offset.
Verb
- To offset.
- The subcontractors themselves outsource work to others in a 'chain of subcontractors' in order further to offlay risks. - 1993, Professor Scott M Lash, Professor John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space - Page 178:
- That seemed to offlay the sense of "the bastards who did this". Quite often there seemed to me to be a sense of failure to protect one's own from the bastards. - 2000, Dorothy Rowe, Friends and enemies - Page 171:
- […] that you are going to control people's lives to the extent that they are able and willing to incur carbon cost which they will then have to offlay. - 2007, Climate Change: The Citizen's Agenda, Eighth Report of...
Origin
From off- + lay. Possibly from Middle English oflæien (“to offlay; delay”), from Old English ofleċġan (“to lay down; put away; overlay; cover”), from Proto-Germanic *abalagjaną. Compare also Dutch afleggen, German ablegen.