Drag

How to spell drag

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drag

What does drag mean?

1. verbTo pull something heavy or resistant along a surface with effort.
2. nounThe force that resists the motion of an object through air or water.
3. nounSomething or someone tedious, dull, or annoying.

Drag in a sentence

• verb

  He had to drag the broken sofa out to the kerb.

• noun

  The cyclist crouched low to reduce wind drag on the descent.

• noun

  Filling in the long tax form every year is a real drag.

• verb

  Please do not drag the table across the new floor.

• noun

  A smoother hull lowers the drag that slows the boat.

• noun

  The delayed train made the commute a complete drag.

Where does drag come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is an old Germanic word that came into English either from Old English dragan, meaning 'to pull or draw', or was reinforced by the Old Norse draga of the same sense, since Viking settlers used a near-identical word. Both go back to a shared ancestor that meant simply 'to haul along the ground', and that literal image of dragging something heavy behind you survives in almost every modern use. Over the centuries it picked up figurative senses, so a tedious event came to 'drag' on, and engineers borrowed it for the force that slows a moving body through air or water. The clothing sense, referring to theatrical or performance cross-dressing, is a separate slang development from the 1800s, sometimes explained by long skirts dragging on the floor. Because the word is short and the vowel is fully sounded, it is one of the rare English verbs that almost nobody misspells.

How the word is built

• drag (single Germanic root meaning to pull or haul); no prefix or suffix