1 [C,U] a piece of old, often torn, cloth used especially for cleaning things:
I wiped the window with a damp rag. * Use a piece of old rag.
seealsoGLADRAGS
2 [C] (informal, usually disapproving) a newspaper that you believe to be of low quality:
the local rag
3 a piece of RAGTIME music
4 (BrE) [U,C] an event or a series of events organized by students each year to raise money for charity:
rag week
IDIOMS
in rags wearing very old torn clothes:
The children were dressed in rags.
(from) rags to riches from being extremely poor to being very rich:
a rags-to-riches story * Hers was a classic tale of rags to riches.
lose your rag (BrE, informal) to get angry
moreatREDadj.
verb (-gg-) [VN] ~ sb (about sth) (old-fashioned, BrE) to laugh at and/or play tricks on sb
SYNTEASE
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for rag is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is rag a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, rag is tagged as noun.
Does rag appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — rag appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.