Lagg

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. To move or progress more slowly than others or expected ; a noticeable delay between when something is initiated and when it takes effect
2. To trail behind or fail to keep pace ; a perceptible gap in time between a cause and its observed result
3. To hang back or move at a reduced speed ; the interval of time separating an action from its corresponding response or consequence

Etymology: "Lagg" is a word for a boggy, marshy strip of land, and it survives mostly in regional English. Its most likely source is Swedish "lagg", meaning a moist, marshy area around a bog. English dialect has its own cousins: "lag" and "leg", used in Sussex and Somerset for a long, narrow, marshy meadow, usually beside a stream. The English "leg" in that sense may come from the ordinary word for a limb, as in the leg of a body of water, though this is less certain than the Swedish link. The English family tree is more tangled than it first looks. Middle English had "lech" or "lech(e)", a sluggish stream flowing through a bog, and that same word is the ancestor of "letch" in its older meaning. Place names keep the older spellings alive. A Northumberland record from 1352 uses "Cauleg", and one from 1479 has "Caulage", which shows the word lingering in the north long after it faded from ordinary speech.