How to Use lie behind in a Sentence

lie behind

verb
  • The chapel lay behind a heavy door.
    — Literary Hub, 7 Aug. 2025
  • Shops lie behind the façades and the items on sale inside are even in-keeping with the theme.
    — Caroline Reid, Forbes.com, 31 May 2026
  • What obscure motive lay behind this one?
    — Wyatt Williams, Harpers Magazine, 2 June 2026
  • In time, history has exposed the lies behind those charges.
    — Avi Weiss, New York Daily News, 10 Aug. 2025
  • The petite sirloin is a section of beef cut from the sirloin area (which lies behind the short loin and ahead of the round).
    — Lydia Patrick, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Oct. 2025
  • The driver, who had a leg injury, was lying behind the vehicle.
    — Mara H. Gottfried, Twin Cities, 5 Nov. 2025
  • The notable pedigree also lies behind the camera.
    — Anna Marie De La Fuente, Variety, 7 Sep. 2025
  • The evidence of this event could appear in radiation coming from bright sources lying behind the clusters.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 16 Aug. 2025
  • That presentiment lies behind the many present expressions of apocalypse.
    — Literary Hub, 18 May 2026
  • Rain and wintry precipitation are expected to develop along the front, but the bigger concern lies behind it.
    — Mary Wasson, Austin American Statesman, 21 Jan. 2026
  • Volatiles Celestial geometry and past calamity lie behind this lunar south pole target.
    — Dan Vergano, Scientific American, 11 May 2026
  • Prosecutors say Johnson was found lying behind a car in the back of the home, also not fully dressed, with an apparent gunshot wound to his lower leg.
    — Sara Tenenbaum, CBS News, 10 Feb. 2026
  • But whatever personal motivation might lie behind the film is impossible to see in the final product — not in its boilerplate depiction of grief, not in its trite evocations of the occult.
    — Richard Lawson, HollywoodReporter, 21 Oct. 2025
  • Blackwood, with her firsthand knowledge of drafty manors and unhinged families, explains with remorseless precision what lies behind the fantasy—what happens when the houses, and the people in them, are neither charismatic nor lovable.
    — Rachel Syme, New Yorker, 10 June 2026
  • Everyone has a slightly different definition of dark academia, but Possession left me with a strong attachment to stories where making sense of writing from the past, and uncovering what lies behind it, are central to the story.
    — Literary Hub, 19 Aug. 2025
  • One of the clearest examples of an anti-feminist conspiracy theory that lay behind a neo-Nazi attack, DiBranco said, took place in Norway in 2011.
    — Odette Yousef, NPR, 27 May 2026
  • For Avraham Burg, an author and former speaker of Israel’s parliament who has become a prominent critic, what lies behind this state of denial in many Jewish Israelis goes far beyond media influence.
    — Zeena Saifi, CNN Money, 5 Oct. 2025
  • If the hidden money and firehose of lies behind Florida’s failed 2024 ballot initiatives on reproductive freedom and marijuana are an indication, big business and politicians dependent on their cash would move heaven and earth to keep it off the ballot.
    — Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 15 Apr. 2026
  • Still, the elephant in the room remains the People’s Party’s attitude toward Thailand’s sacrosanct monarchy, since reform of Article 112 lay behind Move Forward’s dissolution.
    — Charlie Campbell, Time, 15 Sep. 2025
  • Another followed China’s WTO entry in 2001, which brought a stampede of US manufacturers, and equally unrealistic expectations of what lay behind the Chinese portal.
    — Andy Browne, semafor.com, 14 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lie behind.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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