tug
Definitions
General English
- verb to give something a sudden hard pull
Slang
- noun an arrest or detention of a suspect (in the jargon of the underworld or police officers), a collar
- noun an act of manual sexual stimulation of a male, usually by a female. A less common synonym of hand-job in use particularly in Australian speech in the 1990s.
Origin & History of “tug”
Tug goes
back to a prehistoric Germanic
base *
teukh- ‘pull’ (
source also of German
ziehen ‘pull’ and
English truck (14
th c.), whose original meaning was ‘pull up,
gather up’).
this in
turn was descended
from Indo-European *
deuk- ‘pull’, from
which English gets
conduct,
duke,
reduce, etc.
