Knagg

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. A hard knot in a piece of timber where a branch once grew ; a small wooden peg or pointed projection fixed to a surface
2. The hard lump left in lumber where a limb grew out ; a little pin or sharp protruding point used to hang or catch things
3. A woody knot that marks a former branch in a board ; a short peg or jutting tooth on an object that holds or catches something

Etymology: Knagg is a word that sits in the noun-and-verb pair for a knot in timber and a small wooden peg, and its history runs through Middle English and Scandinavian rather than Latin. The timber sense comes from the knot left where a branch once grew out of a tree, while the peg sense describes the small projection that the knot's shape resembles. Its roots are in Old Norse "knöggr", a word for a knot, and it entered English around the 1300s, when speakers in northern England and Scotland were borrowing many terms from their Norse-speaking neighbours. Because the word came in from a northern dialect, it stayed largely regional and was often spelled variously as "knag" or "knagge" in older texts. The verb sense, to fasten or to provide with pegs, developed from the noun in the same way that many woodworking terms grew out of the objects themselves. A carpenter might knag a beam by fixing a wooden pin into it, so the tool and the action share one name.