Tag

How to spell tag

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tag

What does tag mean?

1. nounA small label attached to an object, giving its price, name, or other information.
2. verbTo attach a label or marker to something, or to mark it for identification.
3. nounA children's game in which one player chases the others and touches them.

Tag in a sentence

• noun

  The price tag was still stuck to the bottom of the vase.

• verb

  The warehouse staff tag every parcel before it is shelved.

• noun

  The children played tag in the park until it grew dark.

• noun

  Each suitcase needs a luggage tag with your address on it.

• verb

  Researchers tag each bird with a tiny numbered ring.

• noun

  A quick game of tag left everyone out of breath.

Where does tag come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The word 'tag' first surfaces in late Middle English, around the 1400s, where it described a small hanging piece, especially a narrow strip or pendant attached to a garment. Its ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain, but most scholars suspect a Scandinavian source, comparing it with dialect words in the Nordic languages for a spike, point, or jagged bit. From the idea of a dangling strip it broadened to mean the little metal or paper sheath on the end of a shoelace, and from there to any small attached label, which gives us the everyday 'price tag' and 'name tag'. The verb sense of attaching a label, and the much later computing sense of marking data with a code, both grew naturally out of that 'something fastened on' idea. The children's chasing game called 'tag', recorded from the 1700s, probably comes from the same notion of touching or catching, the moment one player fastens a touch on another.

How the word is built

• tag (single root, not built from prefix or suffix)