Lag

How to spell lag

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lag

What does lag mean?

1. verbTo fail to keep pace with others or with progress; to fall behind.
2. nounA delay or interval of time between one event and another.

Lag in a sentence

• verb

  Sales in the northern region continue to lag behind the national average.

• noun

  There is a noticeable lag between sending the file and the server receiving it.

• verb

  Older laptops tend to lag when several programs run at once.

• noun

  The time lag between investment and profit can stretch over several years.

Where does lag come from?

Language of origin: Other

Lag first appears in English in the 1500s, originally as a noun and adjective meaning 'last' or 'hindmost', often in children's counting games where the loser was the 'lag'. Its exact source is genuinely uncertain, but most scholars suspect a Scandinavian root, comparing dialect words in the Nordic languages for slowness or the last in a sequence. From the idea of being last it naturally grew into the verb 'to fall behind' or 'to move too slowly to keep pace', recorded from the late 1500s. By the 1800s it had also settled into a noun meaning an interval or delay between two events, which gave us modern phrases such as 'time lag' and 'jet lag'. Because it is such a short, plain word with no obvious foreign spelling, its history is harder to trace than its everyday simplicity suggests.

How the word is built

• lag (a single root word of uncertain origin; no prefix or suffix)