rag

UK/ɹæɡ/

nounB12 meaningsVery rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — rage sits at #2,299leans spoken

Other forms: rags

A rag is a torn piece of old cloth, kept for cleaning rather than for wearing. An old shirt, cut up and thrown in a drawer.

The plural has a second sense meaning shabby clothes, so somebody in rags is destitute, and the rags-to-riches story is one of the oldest shapes in fiction. British English calls a poor newspaper a rag. There is a musical sense too, since a rag is a piece of ragtime. And a red rag to a bull describes anything guaranteed to provoke somebody.

Definitions of rag

1nounragA piece of old torn cloth used for cleaning.B1
“He wiped his hands on an oily rag.”
2nounwornWorn-out clothes.B2
“The children were dressed in rags.”

Phrases it lives in

a red rag to a bull — something certain to provoke somebody

Where it comes from

A rag was a tuft of hair. Old Norse rǫgg meant shagginess or a tuft and Old English raggiġ meant shaggy or bristly, so the cloth is named for being ragged rather than for being cloth.

Proto-Germanic
*rawwa-
Old Norse
rǫgg — tuft; shagginess
Old English
ragg
Middle English
ragge
English, today
rag

Built from

raggiġ · Old English — shaggy; bristly; ragged

From Middle English ragge, from Old English ragg (suggested by derivative raggiġ (“shaggy; bristly; ragged”)), from Old Norse rǫgg (“tuft; shagginess”), from Proto-Germanic rawwa-, probably related to rūhaz. Cognate with Swedish ragg. Related to rug.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

← Vocabulary

rag