[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
AI tools

lag

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

See also: Appendix:Variations of "lag"

English

English Wikipedia has articles on:
Wikipedia Wikipedia

Etymology

Probably North Germanic origin. This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term.

Pronunciation

Adjective

lag

  1. Late.
    • 1592, William Shakespeare, King Richard III:
      Some tardy cripple bore the countermand, / That came too lag to see him buried.
  2. (obsolete) Last; long-delayed.
  3. Last made; hence, made of refuse; inferior.
    • 1690, John Dryden, Don Sebastian, King of Portugal:
      We know your thoughts of us, that laymen are lag souls, and rubbish of remaining clay.

Translations

Noun

lag (countable and uncountable, plural lags)

  1. (countable) A gap, a delay; an interval created by something not keeping up; a latency.
    • 1995, Donald R. DeGlopper, “Introduction”, in Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City‎, State University of New York Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 5:
      Although this work is now presented to the world at large, people who read through it before publication severally raised some issues that should be addressed. These resolve around the lag between the field research and the publication of the monograph, a period of rather more than two decades; the use or non-use of various academic forms of terminology, frames of reference, modes of analysis, or "theoretical paradigms"; and my use of the present tense to describe a place that is most certainly not that way now.
    • 2004 May 10, The New Yorker Online,:
      During the Second World War, for instance, the Washington Senators had a starting rotation that included four knuckleball pitchers. But, still, I think that some of that was just a generational lag.
  2. (uncountable) Delay; latency.
    • 1999, Loyd Case, Building the ultimate game PC:
      Whatever the symptom, lag is a drag. But what causes it? One cause is delays in getting the data from your PC to the game server.
    • 2001, Patricia M. Wallace, The psychology of the Internet:
      When the lag is low, 2 or 3 seconds perhaps, Internet chatters seem reasonably content.
    • 2002, Marty Cortinas, Clifford Colby, The Macintosh bible:
      Latency, or lag, is an unavoidable part of Internet gaming.
  3. (UK, Ireland, slang, archaic) One sentenced to transportation for a crime.
  4. (UK, Ireland, slang) A prisoner, a criminal.
    • 1934, P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves:
      On both these occasions I had ended up behind the bars, and you might suppose that an old lag like myself would have been getting used to it by now.
    • 1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy:
      He sat with his great head tipped forward, scowling with a lag's sullenness, and I swear he had closed off his hearing with his thinking and hadn't heard us coming. 'Father,' said Pym.
  5. (slang) A period of imprisonment.
    • 2017, Anna Leask, Behind Bars: Real-life stories from inside New Zealand's prisons:
      I wasn't scared any more; the second lag wasn't easy, but I wasn't really scared of anything. […] So in my later lags, when I walked into prison everyone had heard about me.
  6. (snooker) A method of deciding which player is to start. Both players simultaneously strike a cue ball from the baulk line to hit the top cushion and rebound down the table; the player whose ball finishes closest to the baulk cushion wins.
  7. One who lags; that which comes in last.
  8. The fag-end; the rump; hence, the lowest class.
  9. A stave of a cask, drum, etc.; especially (engineering) one of the narrow boards or staves forming the covering of a cylindrical object, such as a boiler, or the cylinder of a carding machine or steam engine.
  10. A bird, the greylag.

Usage notes

In casual use, lag and latency are used synonymously for "time delay between initiating an action and the effect", with lag being more casual. In formal use, latency is the technical term, while lag is used when latency is greater than usual, particularly in internet gaming. When used as a comparative to refer to the distance between moving objects lag refers to a moving object that has not yet reached the reference object position, whether linear or rotational. The term latency is not used in technical jargon for linear or rotational distance. The neutral term displacement can be used ambiguously and may refer to the distance between objects without indicating direction. In this use, lag, lags, and lagging are the complements of lead, leads, and leading. For example, For any AC power system, at all reactive loads, the current waveform has a phase displacement or power factor to the voltage. An inductive load has a lagging power factor, while a capacitive load has a leading PF.

Synonyms

Derived terms

Descendants

  • → Finnish: lagi
  • → Swedish: lagg n

Translations

Verb

lag (third-person singular simple present lags, present participle lagging, simple past and past participle lagged)

  1. To fail to keep up (the pace), to fall behind.
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “(please specify the book), Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
      Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag, / That lasie seemd in being ever last, / Or wearied with bearing of her bag / Of needments at his backe.
    • 1616, George Chapman, The Odysseys of Homer:
      Lazy beast! / Why last art thou now? Thou hast never used / To lag thus hindmost
    • 1717, The Metamorphoses of Ovid translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other eminent hands
      While he, whose tardy feet had lagg'd behind, / Was doom'd the sad reward of death to find.
    • 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in seven parts:
      Brown skeletons of leaves that lag / My forest-brook along
    • 2004 April 5, The New Yorker,:
      Over the next fifty years, by most indicators dear to economists, the country remained the richest in the world. But by another set of numbers—longevity and income inequality—it began to lag behind Northern Europe and Japan.
  2. To cover (for example, pipes) with felt strips or similar material.
    • 1941 April, “British Locomotive Developments”, in Railway Magazine, page 173:
      Spun glass mattresses are used for lagging the boiler, which has three Ross pop safety valves on the front ring.
    • c. 1974, Philip Larkin, The Building:
      Outside seems old enough: / Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it / Out to the car park, free.
  3. (computing, informal, video games) To respond slowly.
    My phone is starting to lag.
  4. (UK, slang, archaic) To transport as a punishment for crime.
  5. (UK, slang, archaic) To arrest or apprehend.
    • 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:
      "We must get the old dear out," said Lord Roxton to Malone. "He'll be had for manslaughter if we don't. What I mean, he's not responsible - he'll sock someone and be lagged for it."
  6. (transitive) To cause to lag; to slacken.
    • 1632, Thomas Heywood, The Iron Age:
      The weight would lagge thee that art wont to flye.

Derived terms

Descendants

Translations

See also

Further reading

Anagrams

Afrikaans

Etymology

From Dutch lachen.

Pronunciation

Verb

lag (present lag, present participle laggende, past participle gelag)

  1. to laugh

Albanian

Chinese

Danish

Dutch

Faroese

German

Gothic

Icelandic

Irish

Maltese

Norwegian Bokmål

Norwegian Nynorsk

Old Norse

Old Saxon

Polish

Romansch

Scottish Gaelic

Spanish

Sumerian

Swedish

Tagakaulu Kalagan

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.