Other forms: dragged, dragging, drags
To drag something is to pull it along the ground because it is too heavy to lift. A suitcase with a dead wheel, a sack of compost across the lawn, a chair pulled up to the table with a scrape.
People get dragged too, and unwillingly: he dragged his son round three shoe shops. Time drags when it refuses to move, so the last hour of a shift drags and a film drags in the middle. On a screen you drag a file into a folder, which is where drag and drop comes from. As a noun it is the force of air holding back anything moving fast, which is why a cyclist flattens their back to cut the drag. Informally a drag is something tedious — what a drag — and a drag on a cigarette is one long pull of smoke. Drag is also the word for the clothes and the performance of a drag queen.
1verbdragTo pull something heavy along the ground behind you.~2%
“They dragged the fallen branch off the path.”
2verbsomewhereTo make someone come somewhere they do not want to go.~2%
“She dragged me to a two-hour opera.”
3verbpassTo pass slowly and painfully, said of time.~2%
“The afternoon dragged until the phone finally rang.”
4verbmoveTo move something on a screen by holding it and moving the mouse or your finger.~2%
“Drag the photo into the album to file it.”
5nounforceThe force of air or water pushing back against something moving through it.~13%
“Low handlebars reduce drag on a fast descent.”
6nounboringSomething boring or annoying, in informal use.~2%
“Filling in the forms is a drag.”
7nounsingleA single pull of smoke from a cigarette.~2%
“He took one long drag and put it out.”
8nounclothingClothing worn as part of a performance in the style of another gender.~75%
“Half the cast appears in drag for the final number.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Drag is where two rivers meet: Old English dragan, to draw or pull, and Old Norse draga, to draw or attract, which arrived with Norse settlers and reinforced it. Middle English draggen carried both. They go back together to Proto-Germanic *draganą and a Proto-Indo-European root dʰregʰ-, to draw or drag, a word that has named the same heavy effort for thousands of years.
Middle English
draggen
English, today
drag
Built from
From Middle English draggen, from dragen. From Middle English draggen (“to drag”), early Middle English dragen (“to draw, carry”), confluence of Old English dragan (“to drag, draw, draw oneself, go, protract”) and Old Norse draga (“to draw, attract”); both from Proto-Germanic draganą (“to draw, drag”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ- (“to draw, drag”). Verb sense influenced due to association with the noun drag (“that which is hauled or dragged”), related to Low German dragge (“a drag-anchor, grapnel”). Cognate with Danish drægge (“to dredge”), Danish drage (“to draw, attract”), Swedish dragga (“to drag, drag anchor, sweep”), Swedish draga (“to draw, go”), Icelandic draga (“to drag, pull”). a doublet of draw.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA