Rag

How to spell rag

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rag

What does rag mean?

1. nounA torn or worn piece of cloth, especially one used for cleaning or wiping.
2. nounA newspaper, especially one regarded as sensational or of poor quality.
3. verbTo tease, mock, or scold someone, often in a playful way.

Rag in a sentence

• noun

  He wiped the oil from his hands with an old rag.

• noun

  He refused to believe anything printed in that local rag.

• verb

  His colleagues would gently rag him about his terrible parking.

• noun

  She kept a clean rag in the kitchen drawer for spills.

• noun

  The celebrity gossip filled half of the morning rag.

• verb

  The older students used to rag the newcomers during their first week.

Where does rag come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Rag almost certainly comes from the Old Norse word raggw, meaning a tuft or shaggy growth of hair, the same source that lies behind the adjective ragged. In its earliest English use it described a torn or tattered scrap of fabric, and that core meaning of a worn-down, frayed piece of cloth has survived essentially unchanged into modern English. From the literal scrap of cloth, English spun out several figurative uses: a low-quality newspaper became contemptuously a rag, and the syncopated piano style of ragtime took its name from the idea of ragged, off-the-beat rhythm. The British sense of ragging someone, meaning to tease or to stage rowdy student fundraising, grew up in nineteenth-century university slang, possibly from the same notion of roughing someone up like a worn cloth. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, the spelling has never drifted; the only thing to remember is the single g.

How the word is built

• rag (single root, from Old Norse: a tuft or shaggy piece)