Layman's terms

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about non-experts. For clerical laypersons, see Laity.

The term layman originated from the use of the term laity, but over the centuries, changed definition to mean a person who is a non-expert in a given field of knowledge. The concept of describing something in layman's terms has come into wide use in the English speaking world. To put something in layman's terms is to describe a complex or technical issue using words and terms that the average individual (someone without professional training in the subject area) can understand, so that they may comprehend the issue to some degree.

This page has been transwikied to Wiktionary. Because this article has content useful to Wikipedia's sister project Wiktionary, it has been copied to there, and its dictionary counterpart can be found at either Wiktionary:Transwiki:Layman's terms or Wiktionary:Layman's terms. It should no longer appear in Category:Copy to Wiktionary and should not be re-added there. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and if this article cannot be expanded beyond a dictionary definition, it should be tagged for deletion. If it can be expanded into an article, please do so and remove this template. Note that {{vocab-stub}} is deprecated. If {{vocab-stub}} was removed when this article was transwikied, and the article is deemed encyclopedic, there should be a more suitable category for it.