hag1
/haɡ
/noun
1A witch.This is a place where witches aren't green hags, flying broomsticks, and scaring children away....
- I mean, doesn't everyone think Witches are mythical old hags who ride broomsticks and turn princes into frogs?
- We are little-known and therefore little-understood, and this is exacerbated by Pagans who insist on aligning us with mythical broomstick-flying wart-sporting hags.
1.1An ugly old woman: a fat old hag in a dirty apron...
- And they look nothing like this now, the jaded old hags.
- At first, I found it harder to ignore the pleas originating from young children, women, and old hags.
- I had the vaguely presentable air crew, they had the old hags nearing retirement.
2 short for hagfish.As a first step toward an understanding of the molecular basis for the divergence of pigment patterns and speciation in cichlids, we cloned and characterized a cichlid homolog of the zebrafish hag gene.
Derivatives
haggish
/ adjective ...- Yeah, Debbie, Marla was a real blonde - unlike your haggish self.
- Their father's mother worked a factory job leaving the two sisters with their haggish great-grandmother.
- The haggish woman stepped forward, ‘we must move quickly.’
Origin
Middle English: perhaps from Old English hægtesse, hegtes, related to Dutch heks and German Hexe 'witch', of unknown ultimate origin.
This word used disparagingly (old hag) is literally ‘an evil spirit in female form, a witch’: it derives perhaps from Old English hægtesse, hegtes, related to Dutch heks and German Hexe ‘witch’, source of hex (early 19th century).
Rhymes
hag2
/haɡ/noun Scottish & Northern English
1 (also peat hag) An overhang of peat.But so were the boulders and lumps of peat hag which pocked the scene....
- This broad mass of peat hags and bog pools rises to over 680-metres at the head of Littondale.
2A soft place on a moor or a firm place in a bog.
Origin
Middle English (denoting a gap in a cliff): from Old Norse hǫgg 'gap', from hǫggva 'hack, hew'.