- 1
A layperson is someone who is not a specialist. The older meaning is from church life: a layperson is not a priest, a nun, or a monk — they belong as an ordinary member. From that, doctors, lawyers, and scientists started saying “the layperson” for anyone outside their job: the patient, the person a lawyer is helping, the public. It is a polite, slightly careful word. Older books say layman, and you still hear the set phrase “in layman’s terms,” meaning “in simple words for people who do not do this job.” People now often prefer layperson because it covers men and women. Laywoman exists too, but you meet it less. Though actually, this lay is not the verb lay, “to put something down.” It is a different lay, the one that means “not the trained group.” It does not mean a lazy person.
外行人；平信徒（教會裡不是神職人員）
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
laypersonnoun/ˈleɪ.pɜɹ.sən/
- 1
A person who is not a cleric.
- Holonyms: laity; see also Thesaurus:laity
- We should not underestimate European laypeople. They were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, particularly about death, a religious theme in which everyone had an investment and about which everyone was likely to have an opinion. There is no need to invoke the idea of systematic pagan survival to account for this: Europe’s mass Christianization had been a steady if piecemeal process from the sixth century through to the fourteenth.
- 2
One who is not intimately familiar with a given subject or activity.
- The book was written for professionals, but an intelligent layperson could understand most of it.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。