Word.ws English Dictionary

rag

UK/ɹæɡ/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ɹaɡ/

rag noun: tattered clothes (clothing).

Noun (1)

rag (plural rags)

  1. (especially, in plural) Tattered clothes (clothing).
    • —What a pretty dress! —What, this old rag?
    • It's semiformal. I can't show up dressed in rags!
  2. A piece of old cloth, especially one used for cleaning, patching, etc.; a tattered piece of cloth; a shred or tatter.
    • 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
  3. (derogatory) A shabby, beggarly person; synonym of ragamuffin.
    • For upon the like Proclamation there, they all came in, both tag and rag1596, 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'd1623, Ben Jonson, Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours
  4. A ragged edge in metalworking.
  5. (slang) A sail, or any piece of canvas.
    • 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
  6. (plural, singular, slang) Sanitary napkins, pads, or other materials used to absorb menstrual discharge.
    • "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
  7. (derogatory, slang) A newspaper or magazine, especially one whose journalism is considered to be of poor quality.
    • "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
    Synonyms:
    fish wrap
  8. A poor, low-ranking kicker.
    • I have ace-four on my hand. In other words, I have ace-rag.
  9. (slang) A curtain of various kinds.
  10. (dated) A person suffering from exhaustion or lack of energy.
    • "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
  11. (obsolete, slang) A banknote.
    • 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...1876, The Shamrock, volume 14
  12. An uneven vertical margin (of a block of type).
    • We always leave rag on article typeset for the web.

Verb (1)

rag (third-person singular simple present rags, present participle ragging, simple past and past participle ragged)

  1. (transitive) To decorate (a wall, etc.) by applying paint with a rag.
  2. (intransitive) To become tattered.
  3. (euphemistic, intransitive, slang, sometimes, vulgar) To menstruate.

Noun (2)

rag (countable and uncountable, plural rags)

  1. A coarse kind of rock, somewhat cellular in texture; ragstone.
    • the three walls around the garden, each one of thirty-three feet, were built out of three layers of stone — pebble stone, flint and rag stone.2003, Peter Ackroyd, The Clerkenwell Tales, page 1

Verb (2)

rag (third-person singular simple present rags, present participle ragging, simple past and past participle ragged)

  1. To break (ore) into lumps for sorting.
  2. To cut or dress roughly, as a grindstone.
    • Near-synonym: rough
    Synonyms:
    rough

Verb (3)

rag (third-person singular simple present rags, present participle ragging, simple past and past participle ragged)

  1. To scold or tell off; to torment; to banter.
    • “Yesterday it was Mademoiselle Daubreuil, today it is Mademoiselle—Cinderella! Decidedly you have the heart of a Turk, Hastings! You should establish a harem!” “It’s all very well to rag me. […]”1923, Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links
  2. (UK, slang) To drive a car or another vehicle in a hard, fast, or unsympathetic manner.
    Synonyms:
    beat, thrash
  3. To tease or torment, especially at a university; to bully, to haze.
  4. (transitive) Of dogs, to bite an object, often a toy or leash, and vigorously shake their head.

Noun (3)

rag (plural rags)

  1. (dated) A prank or practical joke.
    • The rascal winked and grinned. 'There are always and means,' said he. 'But don't blame your foreman. He thought it was just a rag. I swapped clothes with his assistant, and in I came.'1929, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, When the World Screamed
    • Well, it’s only a rag, isn’t it?1935, Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
  2. (Ireland, UK) A society run by university students for the purpose of charitable fundraising.

Noun (4)

rag (plural rags)

  1. (US, obsolete) An informal dance party featuring music played by African-American string bands.
  2. A ragtime song, dance or piece of music.

Verb (4)

rag (third-person singular simple present rags, present participle ragging, simple past and past participle ragged)

  1. (informal, transitive) To play or compose (a piece, melody, etc.) in syncopated time.
    • Now let's rag it. We'll keep the notes more or less the same but make the rhythm more fun.2020, Ned Bennett, How To Play Jazz Saxophone, page 9
  2. (informal, intransitive) To dance to ragtime music.
  3. (obsolete) To add syncopation (to a tune) and thereby make it appropriate for a ragtime song.

Noun (5) capitalized: RAG

RAG (uncountable)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism, machine learning) Initialism of retrieval-augmented generation: a method of augmenting performance of LLMs (large language models) by serving them a curated selection of data input, via a combination of relevant data libraries and on-the-fly but relevant search results.
    • Moreover, the effectiveness of RAG might decrease if the knowledge base becomes “polluted” by LLM-generated content.2025, Siming Huang, Yuliang Xu, Mingmeng Geng, Yao Wan, Dongping Chen, Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks, →DOI

Proper noun capitalized: Rag

the Rag

  1. (UK, obsolete, slang) Synonym of Rag and Famish (“the Army and Navy Club in London, England”).
    Synonyms:
    Rag and Famish

rag meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Telugu and Kannada

rag in Hindi

piece of cloth
चिथड़ा cithṛā, लत्ता lattā

rag in Urdu

piece of cloth
چِتْھڑا cithṛā, لَتّا lattā, لَتَّہ latta

rag in Telugu

రాగ్, రాగ్ చేయడానికి, రాగ్ చెయ్యడానికి

rag in Kannada

ರಾಗ್, ರಾಗ್ ಮಾಡಲು
More languagesFewer languages
rag in Gujarati
રાગ કરવા માટે
rag in Tagalog
trapo
rag in Arabic
خِرْقَة ḵirqa
rag in Malay
lap
rag in Indonesian
lap
rag in Thai
ผ้าขี้ริ้ว pâa-kîi-ríu, ผ้า pâa
rag in Vietnamese
giẻ

Examples of rag in a sentence

  • 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...
  • 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:
  • Damn fool girl getting herself trussed up like a chicken, having her skirt pulled over her head as if the whole of this business was some kind of dormitory rag.1953, Ian Fleming, “The Crawling of the Skin”, in Casino Royale, London: Pan Books, published 1955, page 111:

All 40 example sentences with rag

Synonyms of rag

Forms of rag

Noun
pluralrags
Verb
third-person singular presentrags
present participleragging
past participleragged
pastragged

Past tense of rag: ragged

Plural of rag: rags

Origin of rag

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.

Unknown origin; perhaps the same word as Etymology 1, above.

Uncertain. Ideas about the scolding and tormenting senses being related to on the rag are only speculative.

Words formed from rag

Phrases with rag

22 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with rag

39 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about rag

What does rag mean?
Rag means tattered clothes (clothing).
What is rag in Hindi?
Rag in Hindi is चिथड़ा (cithṛā), लत्ता (lattā). See Rag meaning in Hindi.
How do you use rag in a sentence?
And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.
What part of speech is rag?
Rag can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce rag?
Rag is pronounced /ɹæɡ/ (UK).
What is the plural of rag?
The plural of rag is rags.

Words near rag in the dictionary

  1. raftswomen
  2. rafty
  3. rafugar
  4. rafugars
  5. rafute
  6. rag
  7. rag and bone men
  8. Rag and Famish
  9. rag bagger
  10. rag baggers
  11. rag bolt

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rag (page history and authors); RAG (page history and authors); Rag (page history and authors); rag (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rag (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); rag (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-rag.ogg.

Cite this entry: “rag.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rag. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.