drag

Verb

Middle English draggen "to pull, draw, transport," of uncertain origin

Note: This verb has obvious semantic affinity with Old English dragan "to draw entry 1," but there is no evident explanation for /g/ and the short vowel; borrowing from Old Norse (compare Old Icelandic draga "to drag, pull") would also not result in a preserved /g/. Compare drag entry 2.

Noun (1)

Middle English dragge "dragnet, harrow, barge," of uncertain origin

Note: Later senses (in early Modern and Modern English) are largely by zero derivation (i.e., derivation of one part of speech from another without change of form) from drag entry 2. Though Middle English dragge has clear semantic and phonetic affinity with Old English dragan "to draw entry 1" and dræge "dragnet" (see dray entry 1), the /g/ is difficult to explain. Middle Low German draggen "grappling hook for boarding a ship" and sik draggen an "to board a ship" may well be related, but are too distant in sense to be a loan source. Compare drag entry 2.

Noun (2)

of obscure origin

Note: The word drag in the sense "female clothing worn by a man" (hence in drag "wearing female clothing") first appears in the newspaper records of the judicial examinations of Thomas Ernest Boulton (1847-1904) and William Frederick Park (1847-1881), both sons of wealthy families and amateur actors who engaged in cross-dressing. Boulton and Park, dressed as women, were arrested on April 28, 1870, as they were leaving the Strand Theatre in London and charged with "buggery" and conspiring to "openly and scandalously outrage public decency and corrupt public morals." (They were acquitted after a jury trial in May, 1871.) In the examination that took place on May 21, 1870, the hotelkeeper Edward Nelson Haxell testified that Amos Gibbings, part of the circle to which Boulton and Parks belonged, had told him that instead of arranging a musical party at the hotel, "he would make it a little fancy dress affair, and said 'We shall come in drag,' which means men wearing women's costumes." The judge then asked "This is the first time the meaning of the word 'drag' has been given in evidence?" There was no immediate reply, but Haxell later said "I never heard the slang phrase 'drag' used by anybody else than Gibbings." (Quotes are from Reynolds's Newspaper, May 29, 1870, p. 5.) The word was taken up by the press, notably in two imaginative wood-block engravings of William Frederick Park, one showing him in male dress labeled "Park in Mufti" and another in female dress labeled "Park in 'Drag'" (The Days' Doings, May 21, 1871, p. 8). It is unclear if this sense of drag has any relation to the earlier verb and noun. J. Redding Ware's dictionary (Passing English of the Victorian Era [London, 1909?]) has a citation from The Referee (July 24, 1887) containing the appropriate sense of drag ("Mrs Sheppard is now played by a man …I don't like to see low coms. in drag parts …") Ware's definition, however—"petticoat or skirt used by actors when playing female parts"—looks like a contrived attempt to explain a usage he did not completely understand, and his etymology ("Derived from the drag of the dress, as distinct from the non-dragginess of the trouser") is not very convincing. The acronymic explanation "dressed as a girl" is even less convincing. Paul Baker lists the word as both Polari (a lexicon used among gay men in Britain with roots in the argot of theatrical and circus performers) and general slang, a treatment also accorded to camp—see camp entry 3; see Fantabulosa : A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang (London, 2004), p. 112.

Adjective

from attributive use of drag entry 3