rag – English noun declension

English noun forms of rag

Noun: rag
Singularrag
Pluralrags

Sample Sentences

  • —What a pretty dress! —What, this old rag?
  • It's semiformal. I can't show up dressed in rags!
  • rags to riches
  • And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm. [1684, John Dryden, Miscellany Poems: Containing a New Translation of Virgills Eclogues, Ovid's Love Elegies, Odes of Horace and Other Authors, The twenty-ninth ode of the first book of Horace:]
  • Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, toss'd, / And flutter'd into rags; then reliques, beads, [1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 490-491:]
  • […]even by the law of their own might and malice, not having otherwise any rag of legality to cover the shame of their cruelty. [1655, Thomas Fuller, The Church-history of Britain from the Birth of Jesus Christ until the year MDCXLVIII, page 399:]
  • For upon the like Proclamation there, they all came in, both tag and rag [1596, Edmund Spenser, A Veue of the Present State of Irelande:]
  • The other zealous rag is the compositor, / Who in an angle where the ants inhabit, / (The emblems of his labors) will sit curl'd [1623, Ben Jonson, Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours:]
  • Nor will it be achieved by marching in the streets in leather, drag, chains, fish net over-flying-tits or any other get up. It will not be accomplished by hung-over bar rags, hustlers, shallow queens, or angry dykes. [1986 February 8, “It’s Not The Sex, It’s The Morality”, in Gay Community News, volume 13, number 29, Boston, page 5:]
  • Our ship was a clipper, with every rag set, stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all. [1864, James Russell Lowell, My Garden Acquaintance; A Good Word for Winter; A Moosehead Journal, page 83:]
  • "'Oh yes, that's all very well, but we haven't done with it yet,' said the lad, 'we shall have it worse directly,' and he ordered them to furl every rag but the mizen." [1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 191:]
  • "It's heaviest on the first day, which might be why it hurts so much. After that, it slows down and eventually stops, but you'll need the rags for about a week." [2020, Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words, page 56:]
  • "You must behave yourself, dear. Mr. Malone is a Pressman. He will have it all in his rag to-morrow, and sell an extra dozen among our neighbors." [1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:]
  • I have ace-four on my hand. In other words, I have ace-rag.
  • "It took it out of me, though. I'm a rag this morning." "They work you too hard, dear." [1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:]
  • What was he at, do you think? Counting bank-notes; he had bundles of them. […] Well, Guv'nor, he stood up by-and-by, and taking the bundles of rags, the big uns in one hand, tother ones in tother, he toddled out of the room; […] So I tucked my violin under my arm, and sallied out after the old budgy ragman, determined to ease him of his load at the very first lonesome corner I could track him to. [1876, The Shamrock, volume 14:]
  • We always leave rag on article typeset for the web.

Etymology

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. See: Middle English Nouns 'ragge', Swedish Nouns 'ragg'.

Verbs referencing "rag"

Norwegian Nynorsk Nouns ragg.