plug
Pluralplugs
Pluralplugs
- 1A pronged connecting device that fits into a matching socket, especially one used to make an electrical connection.
The vacuum's plug wouldn't reach the outlet, so she used an extension cord.
European plugs have two round prongs and don't fit American outlets.
Similarconnector
Note
Strictly, the plug is the half of the connection that carries the prongs, on the end of the cord. The fixed half it mates with is the socket. You push a plug into a socket and pull it out again, so in careful use the word names the moving part, not the fixed one. The loose 'wall socket' meaning blurs exactly that line.
- 2A piece of wood, metal, or other material used to stop up or fill a hole.
The carpenter tapped a wooden plug into the screw hole to hide it.
Without its drain plug, the boat slowly filled with water at the dock.
Note
The core meaning comes closest to the word's source: Dutch plug, from Middle Dutch plugge, "peg, plug". Before that the trail goes cold. Stopper, bung and stopple are its near neighbors, and dowel shows its peg side. A plug can close a hole for good, like a wooden plug over a screw head, or be pulled out on purpose, as from a tub so the water drains.
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- 5An act of promoting a product, such as a book, film, or play, for example during an interview or a commercial.
Every guest on the show gets thirty seconds for a shameless plug.
The article read less like journalism and more like a paid plug for the resort.
Similaradvertisement, ad, promotion, mention, endorsement
Note
A slang noun that travels with a few verbs: you put in a plug for something, or work in a plug during an interview. Writing in Gay Community News in 1973, A. Nolder Gay complained of "TV full of plugs for fifty-dollar toys". The word often carries a wink at itself, as in shameless plug. The verb form is to plug a product.
- 6An electric socket; a wall outlet into which a corded device is connected.
Every seat at the airport gate had a plug for charging laptops.
He searched the café for a free plug before his battery died.
Similarsocket, outlet, receptacle
Note
Everyday speech sometimes names the receptacle after the thing that goes into it, so looking for a plug can mean looking for somewhere to plug in. Because this is a loose use, socket or outlet is the safer word in instructions or technical writing. Wall plug is clearer than plug alone when the receptacle is meant.
- 7In geology, a usually round or oval mass of rock that formed when molten rock cooled and hardened in a volcano's vent.
Devils Tower in Wyoming is often described as a plug exposed by millions of years of erosion.
Erosion stripped away the cone, leaving the resistant plug standing alone above the plain.
Similarneck
Note
Here the word keeps its stopper logic on a volcanic scale: the plug is hardened rock sealing the vent. Because it seals, pressure can build beneath it until it gives way in an explosion of ash and shrapnel. Geologists use the same word for the rock body whether it is still lodged in an active vent or left standing after erosion.
- 8Someone who sells illegal drugs; a drug dealer.
He claimed he was just a middleman, not the plug himself.
Her plug stopped answering after the arrests last month.
Similardealer, supplier, connect, pusher
Note
Street slang that tends to come with a possessive: my plug, her plug, the supplier someone returns to. Gucci Mane's The Autobiography of Gucci Mane (2017) has him biking back to "my plug's spot." The word belongs to informal talk about the drug trade, so in neutral writing dealer or supplier is the safer choice.
- 9To fire a bullet into someone.
The gangster threatened to plug the witness if he talked.
Somebody plugged him twice in the shoulder outside the pool hall.
Note
Hard-edged slang for shooting someone, and older than it may sound. H. Rider Haggard's The Witch's Head (1884) has "you kept your nerve and plugged him", followed by a wish to have "nailed him through the right shoulder". Cap and pop are its synonyms. Its casualness about violence is what marks it as slang.
- 10A fishing lure with a rigid, buoyant or semi-buoyant body and one or more hooks.
She switched to a shallow-running plug when the bass moved into the weeds.
Saltwater anglers throw large plugs from the surf for striped bass.
Similarcrankbait
Note
An angler's term for a hard-bodied lure. It is rigid and buoyant or semi-buoyant, so it floats or hangs in the water instead of sinking straight down. It carries its own hooks, one or more. You cast a plug into a likely pool and work it back, which is the construction anglers use.
- 11Short for fireplug.
The engine crew hunted for the nearest plug as smoke poured from the windows.
City crews painted every plug on the block bright yellow last spring.
Note
A clipping that keeps the back half: fireplug drops fire and leaves plug, still meaning a fire hydrant. Because plug has so many other meanings, the short form relies on its setting to be understood, such as a fire crew or a city street. It takes the ordinary plural, plugs.
- 12An ornament for a body piercing, shaped like a short cylinder and commonly used in larger-gauge holes, particularly in the ear.
After months of stretching, he could finally fit a half-inch plug in his lobe.
Stone and glass plugs are popular because they don't irritate healing piercings.
Similargauge
Note
Body-piercing vocabulary: a plug is the short cylinder worn once a piercing has been stretched to a larger gauge, most often in the earlobe. Its synonym earspool comes from the same world. Size is the usual qualifier, so a half-inch plug names the stage a stretched piercing has reached.
- 13To have sexual intercourse with someone as the penetrating partner.
In the locker room he boasted about plugging some girl from the gym.
He claimed he could plug any woman in the club, which nobody believed.
Note
Crude sexual slang, framed from the penetrating side: one person plugs another. It keeps company with peg and rail. Like them, it belongs to frank or joking talk between people who share the register, and it is out of place anywhere a speaker means to sound respectful.
- 14To keep steadily working at a task despite difficulty or slow progress.
Even when results were slow, he chose to plug away at the manuscript.
They kept plugging at the problem until a solution finally emerged.
Similarslog, toil, labor, persevere, persist
Note
The persistence verb takes no object and usually brings a particle along: plug away, or plug at a problem. Keep plugging is its natural home. Compare the promotional verb, which needs a direct object: a guest keeps plugging his movie, but a student keeps plugging at the problem. The small word at marks the difference.
- 15A small seedling raised in an individual cell of a tray filled with peat or compost, ready for transplanting.
The nursery sells lettuce plugs ready to set straight into the bed.
She pressed each plug into the soil, keeping its root ball intact.
Note
A grower's word for a seedling together with its small block of peat or compost, raised cell by cell in a tray of expanded polystyrene or polythene. The plant and its substrate go into the ground as one unit, root ball intact. That is why nurseries sell lettuce plugs rather than loose seedlings.
- 16A flat oblong cake of tobacco leaves pressed into a solid block.
The old store sold plugs of tobacco from a glass case.
He bit off a corner of the plug and chewed slowly.
Similarcake
Note
An American word from the chewing-tobacco counter. A plug is the pressed, solid cake, as opposed to loose chaw. The chewer bites or cuts a corner from it, which is why a plug of tobacco is the natural phrase. Outside the US, or away from talk of chewing tobacco, the word usually needs that phrase to make its meaning plain.
- 17A block of wood fitted into a wall to give nails something to grip where the masonry would not hold them.
Carpenters drove the trim nails into a plug embedded in the stone wall.
Without a plug, the nails would never grip the hard masonry.
Note
A builder's plug works the other way round from a stopper. It is let into masonry not to close a hole but to give a nail something to bite. Where stone or brick will not take a nail, the wooden block will, so trim and fittings can be fixed to it. The hole it sits in is made for it, not mended by it.
- 18A branch led off a water main to supply a hose.
The crew opened the plug and water surged into the hose.
A street plug supplied the hoses fighting the warehouse fire.
Similarhydrant
- 19A standard, modular section of an aircraft fuselage that can be added or removed.
Designers stretched the jet by inserting a plug ahead of the wing.
Removing a plug produced a shorter, lighter variant of the airliner.
Note
An aircraft designer's unit of length. Ajoy Kumar Kundu's Aircraft Design (2010) describes adding or subtracting fuselage plugs, up to five rows, distributed on each side of the wing. That is how one basic airframe yields longer and shorter versions. The verbs that go with the noun are add, insert and remove.
- 20To take a drug into the body through the rectum.
They plug the substance to make a small dose go further.
She warned that plugging the drug can damage the tissue.
Note
Drug-culture slang for taking a dose by the rectum, with boof as its closest synonym. Outside that circle, the verb is easily mistaken for one of the word's everyday meanings. In medical or harm-reduction writing, a plain phrase such as rectal administration says the same thing without the slang.
- 21Any worn-out or useless article.
The market stall was full of plugs nobody wanted.
She called the secondhand watch a plug and tossed it aside.
Note
A catch-all for anything worn out or past use. It is the general judgment that the worthless horse and the unsellable book aim at particular targets. It is dated now, so a modern reader is more likely to meet it in older writing than in present-day speech.
- 22A published book that fails to sell, left unwanted on the shelves.
The memoir turned out to be a plug, pulped within the year.
Many New York booksellers promoted the impression that Quaritch had sent only 'plugs' (i.e. unsaleable books).
1997, The Book CollectorOppositebestseller, hit, success
Note
A booksellers' word for dead stock. The Publishers Weekly of 1886 promises a shelf with "no old plugs or unsalable books whatever." By 1997, The Book Collector had to set the word apart and explain it, which shows it had grown dated. It is close kin to the worn-out, useless article. A modern reader is far likelier to take a book's plug as a promotion, so make the meaning clear if you use it.
- 23A broken-down or worthless horse of little value.
The trader tried to sell us a swaybacked plug.
A couple of worn-out plugs stood in the corral.
Note
Horse talk with contempt built in: a plug is an animal nobody would pay good money for, the sorry old plug bound for the glue factory. It is American slang and keeps company with nag, jade and hack, words that pass judgment on a horse rather than simply describe it.
- 24A high silk hat that tapers toward the crown.
A row of men in plugs stood outside the opera house.
He brushed his silk plug before the banquet.
Note
American slang for the tall silk hat of formal dress. As slang, it suits dialogue and period color, as in a row of men in plugs outside the opera. In a plain description of what someone wore, silk hat is the neutral term, and it avoids any confusion with the word's many other meanings.
- 25In certain algae, a growth of protoplasm that blocks the pores of the cells.
Under the microscope, a plug closed each pore in the algal wall.
The cells form a plug to seal off the pore openings.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
This word comes from Dutch 'plug', from Middle Dutch 'plugge' (peg, plug), going back through Old Dutch to Proto-West Germanic. Its deeper origin is uncertain: it may derive from Proto-Germanic, but the word seems to have been limited to northern continental West Germanic, and it is perhaps ultimately from the same source as Dutch 'plag' (cut-out sod).