Two dragsters racing
4 September 2023
(For drag referring to cross-dressing, click here.)
The present-day verb drag comes to us from the Old English verb dragan, with the same meaning, and it either developed from proto-Germanic within English or it was borrowed from the Old Norse draga during the pre-Conquest period. Here is an example of the Old English from Ælfric of Eynsham’s sermon on the life of Saint George, written c. 1000. The passage relates the death sentence passed on the martyr:
Nimað þisne scyldigan þe mid scincræfte towende ure arwurðan godas mid ealle to duste and dragað hine niwelne his neb to eorðan geond ealle ðas stræt and stænene wegas and ofsleað hine syþþan mid swurdes ecge.
(Take this sinner, who by magic, has turned our venerable gods all to dust and drag him prone with his face to the earth through all the streets and stony ways and then slay him with the sword’s edge.)
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, drag was starting to be used as a noun, referring to a dragnet or to a plow or harrow. And by the seventeenth century, drag or drug was being used to refer to vehicles. The 1679 edition of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises includes a drawing of a hand-cart called a drug, and the 1693 edition includes the drawing and this definition:
Illustration of a drug from Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises
§ 12. Of the Drug, and its use.
The Drug described Plate 9. A. is made somewhat like a low narrow Carr. It is used for the carriage of Timber, and then is drawn by the Handle a a, by two or more men, according as the weight of the Timber may require.
Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary includes this sense of drag and cites Moxon’s work as its source.
And in the twentieth century, drag moved from hand and horse carts to automobiles. Green’s Dictionary of Slang has a citation for drag referring to a motor vehicle from 1930 from Dewitt MacKenzie’s Hell’s Kitchen: The Story of London’s Underworld.
As for drag racing, there is a sense of the phrase that developed in the late nineteenth century referring to an amusement associated with foxhunting. A dead fox or other lure would be dragged for the hounds to chase. London’s Observer newspaper from 6 October 1872 has this:
In many places the pheasants give as little amusement in hunting up as an alderman with a red herring and train oil rubbed on his heel would give fun to a drag race.
And in America, the Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle of 26 February 1890 has this:
A drag race was afterwards arranged in which the dogs showed up splendidly. Mr. Lambert’s pack is something of which he is proud and justly so for it comprises some of the finest and fastest fox hounds in this country.
But drag racing automobiles was a post-World War II phenomenon. The term comes either or both of two sources. One is directly from the use of drag to mean a vehicle. The other is from the transferred use of drag to mean a route by which something is dragged, i.e., a street or road, often in the phrase main drag, referring to the primary street in a town. Drag racing was often undertaken on streets, as opposed to specialized tracks. This latter sense of drag appears in the mid nineteenth century. Hotten’s 1859 slang dictionary contains this entry:
DRAG, a street or road; BACK-DRAG, back street.
Two years later we see the phrase main drag in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor:
I come now to the third class of patterers,—those who, whatever their early pursuits and pleasures, have manifested a predilection for vagrancy, and neither can nor will settle to any ordinary calling. There is now on the streets a man scarcely thirty years old, conspicuous by the misfortune of a sabre-wound on the cheek. […] He sells anything—chiefly needle cases. He “patters” very little in a main drag (public street); but in the little private streets he preaches an outline of his life, and makes no secret of his wandering propensity.
Back to the twentieth century and drag racing, the earliest example of the phrase that I have found is from the Miami Herald of 13 July 1947:
“The boys explained, too, that a “drag race” is a lineup of four or five cars on a highway “contesting to see who can get away the fastest from a stoplight.”
And there is this from the San Diego Union of 1 March 1950:
The lights on one of the newly-arrived hot rod cars winked out and the driver came over to join the group of 20 or 30 boys and two or three girls who had assembled beside a two-lane highway across Kearny Mesa for an outlaw “drag race.” The track was a ¼-mile straightaway.
Sources:
Ælfric. “XIV. April 23. St. George Martyr.” Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, vol 1 of 4. Walter W. Skeat, ed. Early English Text Society O.S. 82. London: Oxford UP, 1885, 316, lines 153–57. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. drag, n.1.
“Hot Rod Builders Race Speed Creations Clandestinely to Avoid Clash with Law.” San Diego Union (California), 1 March 1950, a-12/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Hotten, John Camden. A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. London: 1859, 33, s.v. drag, n. Archive.org.
Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 of 2. London: W. Strahan, 1755. s.v. drag, n.s. Johnson’s Dictionary Online.
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1 of 2. London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861, 218/1. Archive.org.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. drag(ge n.(1), draggen, v.
Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. London: J. Moxon, 1693, 124. Early English Books Online (EEBO). Mention in the 1679 edition is on page 166.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. drag, n., drag, v.
“Pheasant Shooting.” The Observer (London), 6 October 1872, 5/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Stapleton, William. “‘Hot Rods’ Rallying to Provide Sport.” Miami Herald (Florida), 13 July 1947, 1-B/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“The Wild Cat. A Large Crowd Out to See the Chase.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 26 February 1890, 5/2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credits: Tom McKinnon, 1991. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works. London: J. Moxon, 1693, Plate 9, between pages 122–23. Early English Books Online (EEBO).