hag

hag¹ old woman, witch

Etymology

The word for a witch or repulsive old woman is inherited from Middle English hagge, also hegge,^[2][3][4] probably a shortened form of Old English hægtesse (“sorceress, witch”), also hægtes and hegtes,^{[5][6][7][3][2]} which Hoad, the American Heritage Dictionary and Chambers put more cautiously as "perhaps".^[4][8][9] Etymonline and Barnhart explain the shortening by speakers taking the ending for a suffix.^[6][7] The OED notes that the Middle English forms suggest an unattested *hægge, with a doubled consonant it puts down to expressive gemination, as in the pet names Ceadda and Ælla.^[5][10] The Old English word is cognate with Middle Dutch haghetisse and Old High German hagazussa, the latter the ancestor, through Middle High German hecse, of German Hexe,^[5][7][3] and all go back to Proto-Germanic *hagatusjō,^[6][11] whose further origin is uncertain and disputed.^[5] The first element has often been identified with haga (“hedge, enclosure”), the base of haw,^{[5][6][7][3][12]} compared with Old Norse tunriða and zunrita, "hedge rider", used of witches.^[6][7][12] The second has been compared with Westphalian dūs (“devil”), Norwegian tysja (“elf, crippled woman”), Gaulish dusius (“demon, incubus”) and Cornish dus (“devil”),^[3][6][12] and Etymonline takes these back to Proto-Indo-European *dhewes- (“to fly about, smoke, vanish”).^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

A witch, or figuratively an evil woman: about 1230, in the Ancrene Riwle, in a passage on the seven deadly sins that speaks of men who have wedded þeose seouen haggen, these seven hags.^[5][2] Barnhart dates the text to probably before 1200,^[7] and Etymonline dates the word to the early 13th century.^[6]

Semantic evolution

Etymonline suggests that hægtesse, which has no male form, once meant a woman of prophetic powers, since Ælfric uses it for pythonissa;^[6][13] in Old English it also named the Furies of classical myth.^[5][13] Piers Plowman (about 1400) has the disparaging sense, an old or ugly woman,^[5][2] but the word remained rare until the 16th century,^[6][7][4] and Barnhart notes that Hexe became common at about the same time.^[7] Elyot's dictionary of 1538 has it for a female evil spirit and for a frightening ghost,^[5] and by 1563 it could personify something unpleasant or evil.^[5] The verb hag meant to torment or harass from 1525, and a sleeper in particular from 1598;^[5] Johnson (1755) defined it as harassing "with vain terrour".^[14] Also in 1598 the noun came to mean a spirit that suffocates sleepers, and then the suffocating feeling or nightmare itself, a use now surviving in Newfoundland.^[5] Johnson's three senses were a fury or she-monster, a witch, and an old ugly woman.^[14] English dialects applied it to fairies and pixies as well as witches, and formed hag-ride, to bewitch or afflict with nightmare, and hag-stone, a holed stone used as a charm against witches.^[15] The fish, the hagfish, is probably so called for its unpleasant appearance and behaviour.^[5][16] In 20th-century American slang a hag is an unattractive or promiscuous young woman: Green's slang dictionary has it in campus use from 1928, the OED from 1932.^[17][5]

Timeline

• c. 1230 – a witch; figuratively, the deadly sins as hags.^[5][2]
• c. 1400 – an old or ugly woman, in Piers Plowman.^[5][2]
• 1525 – verb, to torment or harass.^[5]
• before 1529 – an old, ugly or malicious man, in Skelton (obsolete by 1698).^[5]
• 1538 – an evil spirit in female form (obsolete by 1810); a frightening apparition or ghost (obsolete by 1637).^[5]
• 1563 – a personification of something unpleasant or evil.^[5]
• 1598 – a spirit causing suffocation in sleep; a feeling of suffocation, a nightmare.^[5]
• 1894 – in the Caribbean and the Gullah-speaking parts of South Carolina and Georgia, a person, typically an old woman, regarded as a witch who sheds her skin at night and torments sleepers or sucks their blood.^[5]
• 1928 – American slang, an unattractive or promiscuous young woman.^[17] The OED first records this in 1932.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. An ugly or unpleasant old woman, especially a malicious one; also a general term of abuse for a woman: The neighbours called her an old hag behind her back.^[16][5][9]
2. A witch; a woman thought to have dealings with the devil.^{[16][3][5][18]}
3. (slang, derogatory) An unattractive or promiscuous young woman.^[5][17]
4. A hagfish.^[16][9]
5. (regional) A nightmare, or the feeling of suffocation in sleep.^[3][5]
6. (archaic) A female demon or evil spirit; a fury.^{[3][16][5][14]}

Verb

1. (regional) To torment or harass.^[5][3][14]

Word family

• haggish
• haggishly
• haggishness
• hagfish
• hagridden
• hagride
• hagborn

hag² break in a moor, peat bank

Etymology

The break in a moor is borrowed from Old Norse hǫgg (“blow, cut, notch, gap, ravine”),^{[18][19][3][20][21][12][10]} from hǫggva (“to hew, hack”),^[18][19][21] which is cognate with Old English hēawan, the source of hew.^[5][21] The OED's revised entry reconstructs an early Scandinavian *haggwa- as the source of the English noun,^[5] and the verb hag, to hack, comes from the same Scandinavian verb, as haggen.^{[5][18][21][3]} The Middle English Dictionary derives the noun from that verb.^[2] The OED also places the northern sense "coppice, wood for cutting" here, as the Middle English Dictionary does,^[5][2] whereas the Shorter Oxford and Merriam-Webster take the wooded enclosure separately from hagi (“enclosed pasture”), related to haga.^[18][3]

Earliest recorded meaning

A break or fissure in a crag or cliff: before 1400, in the Cursor Mundi, of a castle on a crag wituten hag,^[5][22] a sense the Shorter Oxford and Hoad record only in Middle English.^[18][4] Dictionary.com dates the noun to 1250–1300.^[10] The verb, to chop or fell, is recorded from 1294,^[5] and the word occurs in Yorkshire place names such as Haggesgata from the late 12th century, in the sense of woodland marked off for cutting.^[2][5]

Semantic evolution

Applied to ground, the word gave a pit, hollow or marshy place, especially a patch of exposed peat lying below the surrounding moor, from before 1600 in a Scots translation of Boece.^[5][4] The English Dialect Dictionary records it in Scotland and northern England as a piece of soft bog or a break in a moss from which peat has been cut, also called a moss-hag or peat-hag, with Scott's Tearing thro' moss and hagg in The Abbot (1820).^[15] In the reverse direction it came to mean the firm ground or bank of peat rising above a bog, first in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805),^[5][18][3] and in the south of Scotland a grassy overhanging bank of a stream (1886).^[5] In Northumberland and Yorkshire it meant a rock or cliff,^[15][5] and in Galloway and Yorkshire wild, broken moorland.^[15] Applied to timber, it gave an area of woodland set aside for felling (1410), a division of such a wood (1602), and the brushwood itself (1808),^[5][3] while the plain sense of a notch made by a heavy blow survives chiefly in Scots and northern Irish English.^[5][3]

Timeline

• 1294 – verb, to cut or chop roughly; to fell wood.^[5]
• before 1400 – noun, a break or fissure in a crag or cliff (obsolete).^[5]
• 1410 – an area of woodland set aside for cutting.^[5]
• 1535 – an act of felling trees, or the wood it produces (obsolete by 1879).^[5]
• 1568 – a notch or cut made by a heavy blow.^[5]
• before 1600 – a pit or gully in the ground; a patch of exposed peat below the moor.^[5]
• 1805 – firm ground or a bank of peat rising above a bog.^[5]
• 1868 – in Yorkshire, a broken or rocky bank.^[5]
• 1886 – in southern Scotland, a grassy overhanging bank of a stream.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. (Scottish and northern English) A soft, marshy break in a moor, left by peat-cutting or running water; a peat hollow.^{[18][3][15][5]}
2. (Scottish and northern English) A firm bank of peat or ground rising above a bog.^[18][3][5]
3. (northern English and Scottish) An area of woodland marked off for felling; a coppice; also the felled brushwood.^[5][3][15]
4. (Scottish) A notch or cut made with a heavy blow.^[5][3]
5. (Yorkshire) A rock or cliff; a broken bank.^[5][15]
6. (obsolete) A break or chasm in a crag or cliff.^[5][18][4]

Verb

1. (Scottish and northern English) To hack, chop or hew, especially wood.^[5][18][3]