shrag
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Compare scrag.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]shrag (plural shrags)
Verb
[edit]shrag (third-person singular simple present shrags, present participle shragging, simple past and past participle shragged)
- (uncommon) To cut or lop; to trim or prune (something, such as a tree).
- 1552, Hulget:
- Twygges or boughes of trees cut of[f], or shragged, […] Shragge vnder so that the sunne maye come to the ground, […]
- 1900 December 1, The Oxford Times, section 2:
- About 350 loads of excellent beech timber, with the felling fagots, 1,500 shragging fagots, 5 lots of small ash, 15 large ash, and 22 large elm trees, [...] will be sold by auction.
- (Can we date this quote?) James Wright, Rain / Edward Thomas (poem), quoted in Above the River: The Complete Poems (1990), page 19:
- It is raining today in Steubenville. / Blessed be the dead whom the rain rains upon. / And damned the living who have their few days. / And blessed your thorned face, Your shragged November, / Your leaf, / Lost.
- 1552, Hulget:
References
[edit]- “shrag”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- Joseph Wright, editor (1905), “SHRAG, v. and sb.1.”, in The English Dialect Dictionary: […], volume V (R–S), London: Henry Frowde, […], publisher to the English Dialect Society, […]; New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, →OCLC.