flag – English noun declension

English noun forms of flag

Noun: flag
Singularflag
Pluralflags

Sample Sentences

  • The vote in the Bundestag (parliament) on Thursday makes defiling foreign flags equal to the crime of defiling the German flag. […] The new law also applies to acts of defilement besides burning, such as publicly ripping a flag up. [2020 May 15, “Burning EU and other flags can now bring German jail term”, in BBC, archived from the original on 04 Jun 2025:]
  • The flag of France has three vertical stripes.
  • This will be used as a help message if the user passes in the --help flag, like so: […] [2021, Angel Sola Orbaiceta, Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers, pages 19–2:]
  • I was shooting an IFR approach down the San Francisco slot, when all of a sudden the ILS flag popped up. [1966, Barry J. Schiff, All about Flying: An Introduction to the World of Flying, page 72:]
  • […] and then the OFF flag popped up and the needle went dead. [1980, Paul Garrison, Flying VFR in marginal weather, page 139:]
  • A flag of P is a sequence (F₀, F₁, ..., Fₘ) of faces of P such that dim Fᵢ = i for each i and Fᵢ is a side of Fᵢ₊₁ for each i < m.[…]A regular polytope in X is a polytope P in X whose group of symmetries in

    acts transitively on its flags. [1994, John Ratcliffe, Foundations of Hyperbolic Manifolds, page 230:]

  • We call P (combinatorially) regular if its automorphism group Γ(P) is transitive on its flags. [2002, Peter McMullen, Egon Schulte, Abstract Regular Polytopes, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and Its Applications 92, page 31:]
  • Roughly speaking, chiral polytopes have half as many possible automorphisms as have regular polytopes. More technically, the n-polytope P is chiral if it has two orbits of flags under its group Γ(P), with adjacent flags in different orbits. [2006, Peter McMullen, Egon Schulte, “Regular and Chiral Polytopes in Low Dimensions”, in Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter, Chandler Davis, Erich W. Ellers, editors, The Coxeter Legacy: Reflections and Projections, page 91:]
  • At the other extreme, with limitless budgets all they have to do is dream up amazing lighting rigs to be constructed and operated by the huge team of gaffers and sparks, with their generators, discharge lights, flags, gobos and brutes. [1999, Des Lyver, Graham Swainson, Basics of Video Lighting, page 103:]
  • Flags and other cutters allow the DP or gaffer to throw large controlled shadows on parts of the scene. [2012, John Jackman, Lighting for Digital Video and Television, page 86:]
  • Suppose you try a different tack, / And on the square you flash your flag? [1887, William Ernest Henley, Villon's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves:]
  • set a death flag
  • raise the heroine's flags (in a galge)
  • […] the orator pulled out a tremendous black doll, bought for a ‘flag’ (fourpence) of a retired rag-merchant, and dressed up in Oriental style. [1851, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, published 1861:]

Etymology

1. From Middle English flag, flagge (“flag”), further etymology uncertain. Perhaps from or related to early Middle English flage (name for a baby's garment) and Old English flagg, flacg (“cataplasm, poultice, plaster”). Or, perhaps ultimately imitative, or otherwise drawn from Proto-Germanic *flaką (“something flat”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- (“flat, broad, plain”), referring to the shape.
2. Germanic cognates include Saterland Frisian Flaage (“flag”), West Frisian flagge (“flag”), Dutch vlag (“flag”), German Flagge (“flag”), Swedish flagga (“flag”), Danish flag (“flag, ship's flag”). Compare also Middle English flacken (“to flutter, palpitate”), Swedish dialectal flage (“to flutter in the wind”), Old Norse flögra (“to flap about”). Akin to Old High German flogarōn (“to flutter”), Old High German flogezen (“to flutter, flicker”), Middle English flakeren (“to move quickly to and fro”), Old English flacor (“fluttering, flying”). More at flack, flacker. See: Middle English Nouns 'flage', German Nouns 'Flagge', Swedish Nouns 'flagga', Danish Nouns 'flag', Old Norse Nouns 'flögra', Old English Nouns 'flacor'.

Verbs referencing "flag"

Danish Nouns flag, Dutch Nouns flag, French Nouns flag, Dutch Nouns vlag, German Nouns Flagge.