Word.ws English Dictionary

sag

UK/sæɡ/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/saɡ/

sag noun: the state of sinking or bending; a droop. Also the alternative form of saag.

Noun (1)

sag (countable and uncountable, plural sags)

  1. The state of sinking or bending; a droop.
  2. A depression or dip in anything.
  3. A place where the surface of the earth, a mountain range, a ridge, etc., sinks or droops.
    • a mass of igneous rock […] shown as a semicircular area of shonkinite exposed in the west wall of the sag. From the valley below, it appears as a dark cliff, perhaps 100 feet in height and a few hundred yards long.1905, Louis Valentine Pirsson, Petrography and Geology of the Igneous Rocks of the Highwood ..., page 43
    • Gunsight Peak north of the sag marks the southern end of the Malad Range that extends into Idaho. Complexly faulted Cambrian and Ordovician shelf sedimentary rocks are present[…]2016 March 10, William T. Parry, Geology of Utah's Mountains, Peaks, and Plateaus: Including descriptions of cliffs, valleys, and climate history, FriesenPress, →ISBN
  4. The difference in elevation of a wire, cable, chain or rope suspended between two consecutive points.
  5. The difference in height or depth between the vertex and the rim of a curved surface, specifically used for optical elements such as a mirror or lens.
  6. A region or spot where the skin has lost some of its elasticity and droops or hangs down.
  7. A person with sagging skin.
    • She was bossy and proud, a dreadful sag of skin and bones, and she was a devilish hard worker.1950, Dorothy M. Johnson, A Man Called Horse; in Indian Country, London: Corgi, 1961, page 173

Verb

sag (third-person singular simple present sags, present participle sagging, simple past and past participle sagged)

  1. To sink, in the middle, by its weight or under applied pressure, below a horizontal line or plane.
    • A line or cable supported by its ends sags, even if it is tightly drawn.
    • The floor of a room sags.
    1. (broadly) To lean, give way, or settle from a vertical position.
      • A building may sag one way or another.
      • The door sags on its hinges.
    2. (figuratively) To lose firmness, elasticity, vigor, or a thriving state; to sink; to droop; to flag; to bend; to yield, as the mind or spirits, under the pressure of care, trouble, doubt, or the like; to be unsettled or unbalanced.
      • The mind I sway by, and the heart I bear, / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
  2. (intransitive, e.g., movie) To fail to sustain interest; to be boring.
    • The movie really sags after the chase scene.
  3. To loiter in walking; to idle along; to drag or droop heavily.
    • When Handy had gone, Bert Barricue sagged in, unwashed, unshaven. He sat down stiffly.1949, Dorothy M. Johnson, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; in Indian Country, London: Corgi, 1961, page 106
  4. (transitive) To cause to bend or give way; to load.
  5. (informal, transitive) To wear one's trousers, shorts, etc., so that their top is well below the waist.
    • He sags his pants real low.
  6. (informal, intransitive, usually, shorts) To be worn so that the top is well below the waist.
    • His pants were sagging low.
  7. (Canada, informal) To pull down someone else's pants as a prank.

Proper noun (1) capitalized: SAG

SAG

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of Screen Actors Guild.

Phrase capitalized: SAG

SAG

  1. (abbreviation, initialism, on a letter) Initialism of Saint Anthony guide.

Noun (2) capitalized: SAG

SAG (plural SAGs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of straight-acting gay.

Noun (3) capitalized: Sag

Sag (plural Sags)

  1. (abbreviation, clipping, informal) Clipping of Sagittarius.
    • For example, a Sag girl living on a farm could pick and chop cotton better than her brothers.1996, Thelma Balfour, Black Sun Signs: An African-American Guide to the Zodiac, page 180
    • If you have a Sag cat, it's going to be hard keeping it inside all the time - or even half the time. If you've got an animal that traditionally stays in cages, don't expect to have a real happy enclosed Sagittarian critter.1998, Diana Nilsen, Your Pet's Horoscope, page 75
    Synonyms:
    Saggie, Saggy

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Sag

Sag

  1. Alternative letter-case form of SAG (“Screen Actors Guild”).
    • The use of AI in the production of film and television – either to write scripts, generate actors’ likenesses, or cut corners in paying creative work, has been a major point of contention in negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and Sag and the Writers...2023 July 26, Adrian Horton, “Netflix lists AI job worth $900,000 amid twin Hollywood strikes”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Also used as

sag is also the alternative form of saag.

Examples of sag in a sentence

  • Her once firm bosom began to sag in her thirties.
  • The weather became more and more threatening; the ship sagged to the leeward more than she ought.1890, Great Britain. High Court of Justice. Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division, The Law Reports. Probate Division in the Courts of...

All 40 example sentences with sag

Synonyms of sag

Forms of sag

Noun
pluralsags
pluralSAGs
pluralSags
alternative form (dialectal)seg
alternative form (dialectal)segg
alternative form (obsolete)sack
Verb
third-person singular presentsags
present participlesagging
past participlesagged
pastsagged

Plural of sag: sags

Origin of sag

From earlier sag, sagg, sack, from Middle English saggen, probably from Middle Low German sacken (“to sink, drift”), ultimately of North Germanic/Scandinavian/Old Norse origin, akin to Old Norse søkkva (“to sink”), a denasalized derivative of Proto-Germanic *sankwijaną (“to cause to sink”), related to Proto-Germanic *sinkwaną (“to sink”). Cognate with Scots seg (“to sink”), Danish sakke (“to lag behind”), Swedish sacka (“to lag”), Icelandic sakka (“to sink”), Faroese søkka (“to sink, drop down, descend, set”), Dutch zakken (“to fall, drop, sink”), German Low German sacken (“to sink”), and German sacken (“to sink”) (from Low German). Compare also Norwegian Nynorsk sagga (“to walk or move heavily and slowly”).

Words formed from sag

Phrases with sag

Words that rhyme with sag

39 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sag

What does sag mean?
Sag means the state of sinking or bending; a droop.
How do you use sag in a sentence?
Her once firm bosom began to sag in her thirties.
What part of speech is sag?
Sag can be a noun, a verb, a proper noun or a phrase.
How do you pronounce sag?
Sag is pronounced /sæɡ/ (UK).
What is the plural of sag?
The plural of sag is sags.

Words near sag in the dictionary

  1. SAFs
  2. SAFT
  3. saftie
  4. safties
  5. Safwa
  6. sag
  7. sag bag
  8. sag bags
  9. sag off
  10. sag pond
  11. sag ponds

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sag (page history and authors); SAG (page history and authors); Sag (page history and authors). 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Mélange a trois-sag.wav.

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