rage
Pluralrages
Pluralrages
- 1Violent anger that a person cannot control.
Like a storm that breaks all at once, sweeping reason aside.
Blind rage drove him to overturn the table.
She struggled to control the rage building inside her.
Similarfury, anger, wrath, ire, frenzy
Oppositecalm, composure, serenity
Note
Anger of this kind shares a Latin ancestor with a disease. Through Anglo-Norman and Late Latin rabia it goes back to Latin rabiēs, "anger, fury", which also gave English rabies. It pushed out the native Old English wōd, "madness, fury", which survives only in dialect as wood, "mad, furious". The noun counts both ways: rage in general, or a ghastly rage, one outburst among many.
- 2To act or speak with intense, heated anger.
She raged against the unfair decision for hours.
Protesters rage outside the courthouse every morning.
Similarrant, rave, fume, storm, seethe
Note
The verb came later and was built on the noun: Middle English ragen, from Old French rager. Like the anger noun, it displaced native words, here Old English wēdan "to rage" and iersian. It is intransitive, so the target of the anger comes in with a preposition, as in rage about or rage against. Where the anger is caused in someone else, modern English uses enrage.
- 3To move or continue with great violence, as a storm does.
The blizzard raged for three days without pause.
Battles rage along the border whenever tensions rise.
Similarrave
Note
Weather is the classic subject. Storms and tempests rage, and so does the wind wrenching at the fastenings in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room (1922). Battle rages too: John Milton's Paradise Lost (1674) lets discord and chariot wheels rage. With an impersonal subject nobody is angry. The word keeps only violence and persistence, as when a storm "raged up the East Coast."
- 4A current fashion, fad, or craze.
Minimalist interiors are the rage in design circles this season.
The new fitness app quickly became the rage among office workers.
Similarcraze, fad, fashion, trend, vogue
Note
Fashion took over the word for fury: a craze is a passion a whole crowd shares at once. Today the sense lives mostly in the fixed phrase all the rage, used after be or become. Older English let it stand alone, with for or of naming the craze. Emerson in 1841 calls the rage of traveling a symptom of deeper unsoundness, and The Eclectic Review of 1864 laments a rage for boulevardizing.
Vinyl records are all the rage again.
The town caught a sudden rage for roller skating.
- 5An exciting, wild, and noisy party.
The beach bonfire turned into an all-night rage.
Everyone still talks about that rage after the championship win.
Similarparty, rave, bash, blowout
Note
Party slang shared by the US, Australia and New Zealand, where a wild night out is a rage, or, with an agent suffix, a rager. It often comes softened or intensified: "a bit of a rage", an all-night rage. Keep it out of formal writing, where readers will hear the anger meaning first.
- 6To party energetically and enjoy oneself.
The seniors raged downtown after the last exam.
Students rage hard once midterms are behind them.
Similarparty, celebrate, revel, rave
Note
The verb partner of the party noun, with the same slang standing and the same regional reach. Its typical companion is hard, as in raging hard, and it takes no object: you rage, but you do not rage a party. The register is loose and youthful. In the wrong setting it can sound like the angry verb.
- 7A subgenre of trap music from the United States in the 2020s, known for its 808 bass and aggressive, distorted synths.
Producers blend rage with mainstream pop to reach wider audiences.
The mixtape leans heavily into rage, all distorted synths and pounding 808s.
Note
A 2020s trap style whose name works just as often as a modifier. Critics write of the rage sound, rage rap and rage music as readily as of rage itself. The style is closely tied to Playboi Carti's Whole Lotta Red, hailed as the sound of 2021. The name still sometimes wears scare quotes, as in so-called "rage" rap, a sign of how new the label is.
Less common meanings
- 8Any intense or overpowering passion.
The poet sang of love with a rage that bordered on madness.
A rage for glory drove the young officer into every battle.
Note
An older, broader passion that need not be angry at all. Shakespeare's "a poet's rage" in Sonnet XVII (1609) is inspiration. Bacon has a rage of pain, Hawthorne a rage of grief, and Macaulay, as late as 1856, the rage of hunger. The construction is the clue: rage of followed by a feeling. Readers of older texts should not automatically take the word as fury.
- 9To make someone furious; to enrage.
The betrayal raged him past all hope of a calm reply.
The King is come, deale mildly with his youth, / For young hot Colts, being rag'd, do rage the more.
1595, William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Richard the Second”Note
A causative use that died out: to rage someone was to put them in a rage. Shakespeare plays it against the ordinary verb in a work first performed in 1595: "young hot Colts, being rag'd, do rage the more." The colt is first enraged, then raging. The use was rare even then. Today enrage or infuriate does this work, so it is best recognized rather than imitated.
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Origins
It comes from Middle English rage, from Anglo-Norman rage, from Late Latin rabia, and ultimately from Classical Latin rabiēs ("anger, fury"). It is a doublet of rabies and replaced the native Old English word wōd ("madness, fury").
The verb comes from Middle English ragen, from Old French rager or ragier, which was formed from the noun. It replaced native Old English words such as wēdan ("to rage").