bleg

English

WOTD – 20 November 2012

Pronunciation

  • (file)

Etymology 1

Unknown

Noun

bleg (plural blegs)

  1. (Northumbria) A pouting (Trisopterus luscus).
    • 2007, Jack Melton, "Fresh water gives shore anglers a clear problem", Sunderland Echo, 4 July 2007:
      Steve Thompson, on the Moonshadow, won last Wednesday’s WBA boat competition with the only fish of the night, a 1lb 8oz pouting (bleg)
    • 2007, "Sea Angling latest", Sunderland Echo, 7 November 2007:
      Boats are taking ling to 18lb as well as codling to 5lbs and loads of pout whiting (blegs) on squid.
    • 2008, "Sea Angling: Wear in doldrums, Tyne and Tees looking up", Sunderland Echo, 29 May 2008:
      The only report on boat fishing last week was on Tuesday when the Wanderer managed to get out and took about a dozen codling to three pounds plus a few blegs.
    • 2009, "Fishing: Pier marks look favourite for Big Open", Sunderland Echo, 10 December 2010:
      Saturday saw just three Seahan SAC juniors fishing for the J.T. Jacobs Cup, with two weighing in three coalies, a codling and a bleg.

Etymology 2

Blend of blog + beg.[1] Anglo-American writer John Derbyshire claims to have coined this word in 2002,[2] although earlier usage may have occurred.

Noun

bleg (plural blegs)

  1. (Internet slang) An entry on a blog requesting information or contributions.
    I posted a bleg in the hope of learning more about local tourism.
    • 2008, Andrew Sullivan, "The Utter Arrogance Of It", The Atlantic, 29 August 2008:
      Here's a bleg: can anyone direct me to any statement she [Sarah Palin] has ever made about foreign policy?
    • 2010, James Wolcott, "A Grammer of Motives*", Vanity Fair, 9 September 2010:
      Last time I looked, The QOR Club was a shuttered ghost town, and Jeff Goldstein is still doing monthly blegs to pay for the capital letters required to proclaim OUTLAW! at the end of his sporadic posts.
    • 2012, Elizabeth Kantor, The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, Regnery Publishing, Inc. (2012), →ISBN, page 267 (acknowledgments section):
      This book was crowdsourced among many friends, who helped me to new insights about love in the twenty-first century and into Jane Austen; answered frantic Facebook blegs for sources of quotations I couldn't find; []

Verb

bleg (third-person singular simple present blegs, present participle blegging, simple past and past participle blegged)

  1. (Internet slang) To create an entry on a blog requesting information or contributions.
    That guy will bleg on the most unusual topics.
    • 2008, "Strange looks and funny lines from the past week", Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 18 May 2008:
      The Freakonomics blog posted a "bleg" from "Yale Book of Quotations" editor Fred Shapiro, in which Shapiro blegged for modern proverbs.
    • 2009, John J. Miller, "Novels of the Right, cont.", National Review Online, 30 November 2009:
      About ten days ago, I blegged for comments about great conservative novels — NRO readers now have posted more than 200 entries here [hyperlink redacted].
    • 2009, Curtis Brainard, "It’s Tanking; I’m Teaching…", Columbia Journalism Review, 7 August 2009:
      Zimmer had "blegged" (that’s right, begged on his blog) his readers to help him compile a number of book and article titles for inclusion in that list, and they "did not disappoint."
    • 2010, Iain Murray, "Chicagoan Voting System!", National Review Online, 15 April 2010:
      Yesterday, I shamelessly blegged people to vote for my son in a Parents magazine cutest kid contest.

References

  1. Ben Zimmer, "Web", The New York Times, 11 November 2010
  2. John Derbyshire, "July Diary", National Review Online, 1 August 2002

Anagrams


Danish

Etymology 1

From Old Norse bleikr, from Proto-Germanic *blaikaz. Related to blege.

Adjective

bleg

  1. pale, pallid
Inflection
Inflection of bleg
Positive Comparative Superlative
Common singular bleg blegere blegest2
Neuter singular blegt blegere blegest2
Plural blege blegere blegest2
Definite attributive1 blege blegere blegeste
1) When an adjective is applied predicatively to something definite, the corresponding "indefinite" form is used.
2) The "indefinite" superlatives may not be used attributively.

Etymology 2

See the etymology of the main entry.

Verb

bleg

  1. imperative of blege

Romanian

Etymology

Possibly from a derivative of Common Slavic blagŭ "good" (compare Serbo-Croatian blag), or Serbo-Croatian blek.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /bleɡ/

Adjective

bleg m or n (feminine singular bleagă, masculine plural blegi, feminine and neuter plural blege)

  1. soft, shy, silly, dull, weak, foolish, sheepish
  2. (of ears, usually animals) going down, droopy

Declension

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