drag / drag race / main drag

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.

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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).

francium

3 August 2023

Francium is a chemical element with atomic number 87 and symbol Fr. It is extremely radioactive, and only two of its thirty-seven known isotopes are found in nature. Its most stable isotope, Francium-233, has a half-life of only 22 minutes. Francium has no applications other than research. It is, obviously, named for the country of France.

It was discovered by physicist Marguerite Perey in 1939, and she originally dubbed it actinium K, in accordance with the then-current system for naming radioactive isotopes. But with the determination that it was a new element, a new name was required. In her 1946 doctoral thesis she proposed the name Francium and the symbol Fa. The suggestion for the symbol, however, was altered to Fr when officially adopted later that year.

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. francium, n.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

wipe / whip / lash / whiplash

“Snap the Whip,” Winslow Homer, 1872

30 August 2023

Wipe, whip, lash, and whiplash are all words that, at their core, refer to some sort of back-and-forth motion. While we know the etymologies of these words in general terms, some of the specifics are uncertain.

Wipe and whip can be traced back to the proto-Indo-European root *weip-, meaning to turn, vacillate, tremble. Wipe is the Present-Day English form of the Old English verb wipian, which has essentially the same meaning as our current word. An example of the Old English verb is found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s life of Saint Lawrence, in the description of the martyr’s death:

On ðære tide gelyfde an ðæra cempena, ðæs nama wæs romanus, & cwæð to ðam Godes cyðere laurentium; Ic geseo Godes engel standende ætforan ðe mid handclaðe; & wipað ðine swatigan leomu.

(At that time, one of the soldiers, whose name was Romanus, believed and said to God’s martyr, “Lawrence, I see God’s angel standing before you with a hand-cloth and wiping your sweating limbs.)

The verb to whip appears in Early Middle English. It may be a development of the Old English verb, or the sense may be borrowed from a cognate in another language, such as the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch wippen, meaning to move back and forth, oscillate, dance. We see this verb, meaning to flutter or rapidly move back and forth, in the thirteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale. In this passage, the owl berates the nightingale for tempting women into illicit amorous affairs with its song:

Enes þu sunge—ic wod wel ware!—
Bi one bure, & woldest lere
Þe lefdi to an uuel luue,
An sunge boþe loȝe & buue,
An lerdest hi to don shome
An unriȝt of hire licome.
Þe louerd þat sone underȝat:
Liim & grine & wel eiwat
Sette & leide, þe for to lacche.
Þu come sone to þan hacche:
Þu were inume in one grine.
Al hit aboȝte þine shine!
Þu naddest non oþer dom ne laȝe
Bute mid wilde horse were todraȝe.
Vonde ȝif þu miȝt eft misread
Waþer þu wult, wif þe maide!
Þi song mai bo so longe genge
Þat þu shalt wippen on a springe!

(Once you sang—I know well where—by a certain bedroom and would lure a lady into a sinful love, singing both low and high, and lured her to do a shameful and immoral thing with her body. Her husband soon found out: lime and snares and everything he set and laid, in order to catch you. You soon came to the window: you were quickly trapped in a snare. It was all around your shins! You had no other judgment nor law except to be drawn by wild horses. Why don’t you try again, if you wish, to lead a wife or maiden astray? Your song may be so effective that you end up whipping in a snare.)

The noun whip, referring to a scourge, is in place by the early fourteenth century, and the more specific sense of the verb, meaning to beat with a scourge, is in place by the end of that century. From Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale:

This ydelnesse is the thurrok of alle wikked and vileyns thoghtes, and of alle jangles, trufles, and of alle ordure. Certes, the hevene is yeven to hem that wol labouren, and not to ydel folk. Eek David seith that “they ne been nat in the labour of men, ne they shul nat been whipped with men”—that is to seyn, in purgatorie. Certes, thane semeth it they shul be tormented with the devel in helle, but if they doon penitence.

(This idleness is the storehouse of all wicked and lowly thoughts, and of all gossip, trifles, and of all filth. Certainly, the heaven is given to them who will labor, and to idle folk. Also, David says that, “they are not in the labor of men, nor shall they be whipped by men”—that is to say, in purgatory. Certainly, then it seems they shall be tormented by the devil in hell, unless they do penance.)

Whip also has a parliamentary sense on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first half of the eighteenth century, we start to see whipper in used as a term for the assistant huntsman who uses a whip to keep hounds from straying from the pack. It’s not uncommon to first see the earliest recording of a slang or jargon term in the name of a racehorse, and that’s the case with whipper in. The name Whipperin is recorded of a gelding in the 12 September 1728 edition of London’s Stamford Mercury.

A few years later we see whipper in used in a satirical newspaper piece that uses the term to literally mean a huntsman’s assistant and metaphorically to refer to a political party official whose duty it is to keep the members in line and voting for the party’s policies. From London’s Fog’s Weekly Journal of 28 May 1737:

Since I have been taken into the Pack of Court Hounds, and have had my feeding from the Hands of the Huntsman, Gratitude exacts of me, the contributing so far as my Experience will permit (and I flatter myself I am esteemed a pretty Staunch Dog) to better the Kennel, by either encouraging your slow, or retraining your too forward Whelps; some of which latter, will open upon a wrong Scent, mislead a raw Pack and disappoint a Morning’s Sport by their babling. A Babler of a Puppy, may be excused, the Whipper in, may, by his Correction, reclaim him and he may make a good Hound, but when an old Dog will mislead the Pack, there is no other Remedy than the Cord; he is immediately tuck’d up as irreclaimable.

To be more intelligible, and let my Reader know what I open upon, I shall inform him that the Game I have in view is the Reduction of the Interest of the redeemable National Debt, which has happily miscarried in the House of Commons.

We see whipper-in used directly to refer to a party disciplinarian in London’s Annual Register of 1771. The piece gives brief biographies of people in various professions, and the following appears in one on a politician:

That he was first a whipper-in to the Premier, and then became Premier himself; that he led the House of Commons by the nose and hated the city; that he drained the Treasury to enrich his friends and parasites; that he dreaded general warrants, was for a standing army, and constantly opposed the liberty of the subject; and that if he was not beheaded, he ought to have been.

By 1850 the parliamentary sense of whipper-in had been clipped to simply whip, and it eventually crossed the Atlantic to appear in American political jargon as well.

Lash, on the other hand, is of more uncertain etymology. It is possibly echoic and formed analogously with words such as dash, flash, mash, and smash. But it shares the same general sense of beating or striking with whip. (The sense of lash meaning to tie or fasten, is from a different root, borrowed from the Anglo-Norman lasce [ribbon, string] and lascher [loosen] and is related to lace.) Both the noun and verb appear in the poem Of Arthour and of Merlin, probably composed prior to 1300 and copied into the Auchinleck Manuscript c. 1330:

One passage in that poem describes a battle, using the verb to lash (note also the multiple uses in this passage of dash, meaning both to rush and the strike at):

He [tok] kniȝtes þousandes to
And out of his cite dassed him þo
Among þe ribaus anon he dast
And sum þe heued of he laist,
Þis þre þousand he slouȝ anon

(He [took] two thousand knights and dashed out of his citadel. He clashed among the foot soldiers, and some he hewed off, he lashed them, three thousand he quickly slew.)

And another passage uses the noun to mean a blow:

Kehenans com wiþ gret rape
And ȝaf king Arthour swiche a las
Þat Arthour al astoned was,
Arthour smot þat geant oȝan
A dint þat fro main cam
He smot his schulder, wiþ arm and scheld
Þat it fleiȝe in þe feld,

(Kehenans came on with great haste and gave King Arthur such a lash that Arthur was stunned; Arthur smote the giant again, a blow that came with might. He smote his shoulder, against arm and shield, so that it flew onto the field.)

By the end of the fourteenth century, the more specific sense of lash meaning a whip or to beat with a whip was in place.

The redundant compound whiplash, meaning a scourge, appears in the middle-to-late sixteenth century. We see it in Thomas Tusser’s 1573 poetic Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry in a list of things a good farmer has ready for the fall harvest:

Strong exeltred cartt, hat is clowted & shod,
cart, ladder & wimble, with percer & pod.
whele ladders for haruest, light pitchfork & tough
shaue, whyplash well knotted, & cart rope enough.

(Strong axled cart, that is patched and shod,
cart, ladder, and auger, with piercer and support.
Wheel-ladder for harvest, light pitchfork, & tough
sheaf, whiplash well-knotted, & enough cart-rope.)

But the sense of whiplash meaning an injury to the head or neck caused by a rapid and forcible oscillation is much more recent, coming into use with the automobile and injuries related to high-speed travel. It appears in the mid twentieth century. The earliest example I’ve found is from an advertisement for a chiropractor in the 25 September 1950 Columbia Record of South Carolina:

A blow to the head, or a fall may cause the neck to be wrenched out of place. Whiplash injuries, wherein the head is thrown forcibly forward or backward can cause severe trouble. Auto accidents frequently cause this injury.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Passio beati Laurentii martyris.” The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vol. 1. Benjamin Thorpe, ed. Ælfric Society. London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1844, 426. Archive.org.

———. “Passio Sancti Laurentii.” Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, The First Series. Peter Clemoes, ed. Early English Text Society S.S. 17. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, 424.

American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2022.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. lasce, n., lascher, v.  

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale, revised ed. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2003, 26, lines 1049–66. fol. 240va–b.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Parson’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 312, lines 10.1.715–16.

“Damaging Neck Injuries Often Bring Trouble in Later Years” (advertisement). Columbia Record (South Carolina), 25 September 1950, 3-A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Essay Towards the History of Mankind.” Annual Register, fifth edition. London: J. Dodsley, 1771, 196. NewspaperArchive.com.

Fog’s Weekly Journal (London), 28 May 1737, 1/1. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection.

“A List of the Horses Matches to be Run at New-Market in September and October, 1728.” Stamford Mercury (London), 12 September 1728, 72. NewspaperArchive.com.

Macrae-Gibson, O.D., ed. Of Arthour and of Merlin. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford UP, 1973, 309–10, lines 7581–85; 356, lines 9374–80. ProQuest. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (Auchinleck Manuscript).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. whippen, v., lash(e, n., lashen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. whip, v., whip, n., lash, v.1, lash, v.2, lash, n.1, lush, v., whiplash, n.

Tusser, Thomas. Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry. London: Richard Tottill, 1573, fol. 14v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Winslow Homer, 1873. Butler Institute of American Art. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

steward / stewardess

Nelly Diener, the first European air stewardess, 1934. She is standing in front of a Swissair Curtiss AT-32C Condor. She would be killed in a crash in this aircraft in July 1934, soon after this photo was taken.

28 August 2023

Steward has a variety of meanings. We perhaps most often encounter it today, along with its female counterpart stewardess, in the context of air travel, although those uses have largely been overtaken by flight attendant. One can also encounter it in church circles, where stewardship refers to fund raising. But it’s oldest meaning is that of a guardian, one who cares for a noble’s estate.

Steward is a compound of the Old English stig (hall) + weard (guardian). Perhaps the earliest attested use of the word is in a translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies. This text appears in the Southwick Codex, one of two codices that constitute London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv. (The other is the Nowell Codex, also known as the Beowulf Codex.) The Southwick Codex was copied during the twelfth century, but the text is widely thought to have been composed a few centuries earlier. The translation of the Soliloquies has traditionally been ascribed to King Alfred the Great, although recent scholarship disavows that attribution. The lines in question read:

Sam ic wylle, sam ic nelle, ic sceal secgan nide right, buton ic leogan willæ. Gyf ic ðonne leoga, þonne wot God það; forði ic ne dear nan oððer secgan butan soð þæs ðe ic gecnawan can. Me þincð betere þæt ic forlete þa gyfe and folgyge þam gyfan ðe me egðer ys stiward ge ðæs welan ge ac hys freonscypes, buton egðer habban mage. Ic wolde þeah egþer habben, gyf ic myhte ge ðone welan ge eac hys willan folgyan.

(Whether I want to or not, I must speak the truth, unless I am willing to lie. If I lie, then God will know it. Therefore, I dare not speak anything other than the truth, as far I as can know it. I think it is better that I forsake the gift and follow the giver, who to me is the steward both of riches and of his friendship, unless I might have both. I would like to have both, if I could have riches and also follow his will.)

We see steward in the title of a minor noble in the entry for the year 1093 in the Peterborough Chronicle. The entry describes the death of King Malcolm III of Scotland:

Ac hraðe þæs þe he ham com, he his fyrde gegaderode & into Englelande hergende mid maran unræde ferde þone him a behofode, & hine þa Rodbeard se eorl of Norðhymbran mid his mannan unwæres besyrede & ofsloh; hine sloh Moræl of Bæbbaburh se wæs þæs eorles stiward & Melcolmes cinges godsib.

(And soon after [Malcolm] returned home, he assembled his troops and raided into England with greater hostility than was wise of him, and Robert, the earl of Northumberland, with his men surprised and defeated him; Morel of Bamburgh, who was the earl’s steward and King Malcom’s godfather, killed him.)

From this sense of a someone who served as manager of an estate came comes the sense of servant who keeps stores and serves meals. We see this sense in the fifteenth century, first in naval parlance and then more generally. We see it applied to train travel at the turn of the twentieth century and to air travel by the 1930s.

Stewardess, referring to a woman who serves as a steward appears in the seventeenth century.

In Old English, stig can also refer to a pig sty, and therefore a myth has arisen that the original meaning of steward was that of someone who took care of pigs, but there is no reason to think that this is the case. The idea of “hall guardian” fits the known uses far better.

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Sources:

Carnicelli, Thomas A., ed. King Alfred’s Version of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1969, 62. London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv.

Irvine, Susan. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 7. MS E. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004, 103. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636, fol. 69r. JSTOR.

Lockett, Leslie, ed. Augustine’s Soliloquies in Old English and Latin. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 76. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2022, 220.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. steward, n., stewardess, n.

Photo credit: Swissair, 1934. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

mug / mugger / mug shot

“Toby jug,” made by Ralph Wood, c. 1782–95.

26 August 2023

Mug is a word that has undergone a number of semantic shifts, or changes in meaning, over the centuries. So much so that today one wonders what connection, if any, there is between the drinking vessel and getting robbed or a person’s face or the photograph taken upon a person’s arrest.

The first known use of mug in English dates to 1400 and it is used in the sense of a dry measure, in this particular case a measure of salt. The etymology of mug is not known; there are cognates in other Germanic languages, but relationship these different words have to one another is uncertain.

By the early sixteenth century mug was being used to refer to large pieces of crockery, and by the middle of the seventeenth century we see the sense that we know today of a large drinking vessel with a handle. From Charles Cotton 1664 mock epic Scarronides, based on Virgil’s Aeneid, where Dido raises a mug in a toast to Aeneas:

Up from her Chayre Queen Dido starts,
And takes a Mug, that held Two Quarts
Of Drink, that she with much forbearing
Had sav'd long since for her Sheep-shearing:
And thus begins, Here Sirs, here's to you,
And from my heart much good may do you

In the eighteenth century, mug was being used as a slang word for a person’s face. How this sense arose is not certain, but it may be from the grotesque faces that often appeared on earthenware drinking vessels of the era. Alternatively, etymologist Anatoly Liberman suggests that the Scots murgeon, meaning grimace, may be the source of this sense of mug. But both of these suggestions must be labeled with “perhaps.”

The sense of mug meaning face appears as early as 1708 in the humorous newspaper the British Apollo. This passage appears in a supposed letter from a woman asking advice about which of her suitors to marry:

Three persons making their addresses to me, a captain, a lawyer, and a merchant; I have enquir’d after their personal estates, for they despise real ones: my captain has his commission in his pocket, which scorns to keep company with any gold there. My Lawyer has a desk, nine law-books without covers, two with covers, a temple mug, and the hopes of being a Judge. My merchant has a vast estate, tho’ at that distance that I have never heard of besides, who have ever travell’d to those parts.

The editors of the British Apollo demur in giving an answer, but instead consult the “Oracle of Apollo,” which responds with some lines of verse that describe the risks of each choice but do not offer any actionable advice. The temple here refers to the Inns of Court near Temple Church in London which contain barristers’ chambers and solicitors’ offices. A man with a temple-mug would have the countenance expected of a lawyer.

And from this sense of mug meaning face we get mug shot, the photograph of a person who has been arrested. Mug shot arose in American police jargon in the first half of the twentieth century. We see its development in this Indiana newspaper article from 20 December 1911. The noun phrase isn’t yet in place, but we can see that it is coming:

Sergeant Weifenbach characterizes them as the toughest mugs that he has ever had to deal with. They spend their time in cursing and annoying the other prisoners. Captain Evans of the Chicago department[t,] head of the bureau of identification, has asked the local authorities to have their “mugs shot,” and accordingly a photographer has been engaged to get pictures of the criminals.

The verb phrase have one’s mug shot, meaning to have one’s portrait photographed, appears in various contexts after this, not all having to do with police procedures. But we don’t see the noun phrase mug shot for a couple of decades. From Iowa’s Des Moines Register of 5 July 1936:

Of course there are many other wanted men in the thousands of files of the bureau. There are “mug” shots, or pictures, and identifications and criminal records of hundreds who are sought for poultry theft, car stealing, larceny, forgery, farm implement and produce theft, rape, arson and so on down the long list of crimes.

Along another path of the word’s development, by the early nineteenth-century mug had become a slang verb in the boxing community that meant to strike an opponent in the face. And by 1864 J. C. Hotten’s Slang Dictionary recorded the verb as meaning to rob someone:

MUG, to strike in the face, or fight. Also to rob by the garrote.

So the sense transferred from the face, to striking someone in the face, to robbing someone by striking or threatening to strike them. At about the same time the noun mugger, meaning a robber, also appears.

There are various other senses of mugger. The use of the word to mean a dealer or tinker in crockery dates to 1743. Mugger is nineteenth century British schoolboy slang for a diligent student, what we might now term a nerd or grind. The name for the mugger crocodile, native to India, appears by 1844. This name is unrelated to the other mugs and muggers, coming from the Hindi magar, meaning crocodile.

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Sources:

British Apollo, third edition, vol. 1 of 3. London: Theodore Sanders and Arthur Bettesworth, 1726, 8. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Cotton, Charles. Scarronides. London: E. Cotes for Henry Brome, 1664, 107. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, 1971, s.v. murgeo(u)n, n. Dictionaries of the Scots Language.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. mug, n.1, mug, v.1, mug shot, n. Note: Green’s has a quotation for the noun phrase mug shot from 1912, but this is actually an instance of the verb phrase, to have one’s mug shot.

Hotten, John Camden. The Slang Dictionary. London: 1864, 183, s.v. mug, v. Archive.org.

Liberman, Anatoly. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008, s.v. mooch,164.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. mug, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2003, s.v. mug, n.1, mug, n.3., mugger, n.2., mugger, n.1., mugger, n.5., mugger, n.3., mug shot, n.

“Police Capture Hamilton and Pal Without a Shot” (photo caption). Dallas Morning News (Texas), 22 August 1938, 1/3–4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Scottish National Dictionary, 1965, s.v. murgeon, n., v. Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL).

Spry, Dick. “Seven Iowa Public Enemies Still Evade Dragnet of Law Agencies.” Des Moines Register (Iowa), 5 July 1936, Iowa News 4/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Toughs Finally Landed,” Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana), 20 December 1911, 4/1. Newspapers.com.

Photo credit: Andreas Praefcke, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, C.42-1955. Public domain image.