The Hag of the Mill, Arthur Rackham, 1920
15 October 2025
The word hag, like the woman it represents, is old, tracing back to Old English, but hag does not appear to be a very common word until the sixteenth century, when it underwent an explosion of usage and popularity. And while today hag simply means an ugly old woman, the history of the word indicates that it once meant something darker and more sinister.
The Old English progenitor of the word is hægtesse, which meant a Fury of classical mythology, a witch or sorceress, or, in one instance, anger personified. The Old English word is relatively rare, appearing mostly in glosses of Latin text that reference the Furies. It does appear in the Metrical Charm 4 / Lacnunga 127, which was to be used to cure a stab wound or a stabbing pain:
Ut, spere, næs in, spere!
Gif her inne sy isernes dæl,
hægtessan geweorc, hit sceal gemyltan.
(Out, spear! Not in, spear! If here within is any piece of iron, the work of hags, it shall melt.)
A clipped form *hægge may have existed in Old English, but if it did, it doesn’t appear in the extant corpus. But we do see the clipped hagge in Middle English. The clipped hagge appears in the B text of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, c. 1378:
And þanne cam coueytise can I hym nouȝte descryue,
So hungriliche and holwe sire [Heruy] hym loked.
He was bitelbrowed, and baberlipped also,
With two blered eyghen as a blynde hagge.
(And then came Avarice. I cannot describe him. Hungry-looking and hollow, he looked like Sir Hervy. He was sullen [lit. sharp-browed], and thick-lipped also, with two bleary eyes, as a blind hag.)
(“Sir Hervy” is probably a cultural reference with whom the fourteenth-century audience would have been familiar but whose significance is lost to us today.)
The modern hag has cognates in other Germanic languages that underwent parallel transformations. The Old High German hagazissa became the modern German hexe, and the Middle Dutch haghetisse became the modern Dutch hecse. The English hex, meaning a magical spell, while ultimately from the same root, is a nineteenth century import from modern German.
In modern use, hag has a number of different, albeit related, meanings. Because the term is not common before 1550 and by that date all the senses were in use, it is hard to determine the order in which the senses arose. These include references to the Furies and Harpies of classical myth, assorted evil creatures (such as bogeymen and nightmares), witches, and simply old women. We do know that from its earliest days, hag has had the meaning of an evil spirit, especially a female demon. The term night-hag dates to the seventeenth century, originally referring to female ghosts and spirits believed to visit men at night—the succubi of nightmares—but now used to refer to the psychological phenomenon of imagined paralysis and hallucination that occurs in some people as they fall asleep, often mistaken today as alien abduction.
Sources:
Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. hægtesse, n.
Langland, William. The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, part 2 of 4. Walter W. Skeat, ed. London: N. Trübner, 1869, 5.188–91, 67. Archive.org.
Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. hagge, n.
Niles, John D, ed. “Lacnunga 127.” In John D. Niles and Maria D’Aronco, eds. Medical Writings from Early Medieval England, vol. 1. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 81. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2023, lines 15–17, 494–97. London, British Library, MS Harley 585.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2021, s.v. hag, n.1.; September 2023, s.v. night-hag, n.
Image credit: Arthur Rackham, 1920. In James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales. New York: Macmillan, 1920, opposite 310. Archive.org. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
