Laggs

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. To fall behind or move more slowly than expected ; to wrap insulation around pipes to prevent heat loss
2. To move with slowness or delay ; to encase pipes with a protective insulating material
3. To fail to keep pace or progress sluggishly ; to cover piping with thermal insulation or lagging material

Etymology: "Laggs" is the plural of "lagg", a word for a long, narrow, marshy meadow, often running along the edge of a stream. The term is most likely borrowed from Swedish "lagg", meaning a moist, marshy area around a bog, and it turns up in the English dialects of Sussex and Somerset under the forms "lag" and "leg". That last form is probably tied to "leg" in the sense of a limb, as if the meadow were a long arm of land reaching out from a larger field. The word has an older relative in Middle English, "lech" or "lache", meaning a sluggish stream flowing through a bog, which later gave English the word "letch" in a different sense. The old form survives mostly in place-names, where spellings such as "Caulage" appear in records from the fifteenth century.