lag

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A barrel stave.
• noun A strip, as of wood, that forms a part of the covering for a cylindrical object.
• transitive verb To furnish or cover with lags.
• intransitive verb To fail to keep up a pace; straggle.
• intransitive verb To proceed or develop with comparative slowness.
• intransitive verb To weaken or slacken; flag.
• intransitive verb Games To determine the order of play by hitting or shooting a ball toward a mark, as in marbles or billiards, with the player whose ball stops closest to the mark going first.
• intransitive verb To fail to keep up with (another).
• intransitive verb To proceed or develop at a slower pace than (another).
• intransitive verb Sports In golf, to hit (a putt) so that it stops a short way from the hole and can then be tapped in.
• noun An interval between one event or phenomenon and another.
• noun A condition of weakness or slackening.
• transitive verb To arrest.
• transitive verb To send to prison.
• noun A convict.
• noun An ex-convict.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To move slowly; fall behind; hang back; loiter; linger.
• To slacken.
• To clothe, as a steam-boiler, to prevent radiation of heat.
• To bring into the hands of justice; cause to be punished for a crime.
• To take; steal.
• Slow; tardy; late; coming after or behind.
• Long delayed; last.
• noun One who or that which comes behind; the last comer; one who hangs back.
• noun The lowest class; the rump; the fag-end.
• noun In mech., the amount of retardation of some movement: as, the lag of the valve of a steam-engine.
• noun In machinery, one of the strips which form the periphery of a wooden drum, the casing of a carding-machine, or the lagging or covering of a steam-boiler or-cylinder.
• noun An old convict.
• noun A term of hard labor or transportation.
• noun In electricity, the displacement of phase of an electric wave back, or behind (in time), to another electric wave: used mainly with regard to alternating-current circuits.
• noun See lagging of the tides, under lagging.
• noun The angle corresponding to the lag of the tides; the hour-angle between the lunar transit and the flood-tide; the shifting of the earth's magnetic system from a symmetrical distribution about the noon meridian into the observed eccentric position.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• adjective obsolete Coming tardily after or behind; slow; tardy.
• adjective Last; long-delayed; -- obsolete, except in the phrase lag end.
• adjective obsolete Last made; hence, made of refuse; inferior.
• noun Slang, Eng. One transported for a crime.
• intransitive verb To walk or more slowly; to stay or fall behind; to linger or loiter.
• transitive verb obsolete To cause to lag; to slacken.
• transitive verb (Mach.) To cover, as the cylinder of a steam engine, with lags. See Lag, n., 4.
• noun obsolete One who lags; that which comes in last.
• noun The fag-end; the rump; hence, the lowest class.
• noun The amount of retardation of anything, as of a valve in a steam engine, in opening or closing.
• noun (Mach.) A stave of a cask, drum, etc.
• noun (Zoöl.) See Graylag.
• noun The failing behind or retardation of one phenomenon with respect to another to which it is closely related.
• noun the interval by which the time of high water falls behind the mean time, in the first and third quarters of the moon; -- opposed to priming of the tide, or the acceleration of the time of high water, in the second and fourth quarters; depending on the relative positions of the sun and moon.
• noun an iron bolt with a square head, a sharp-edged thread, and a sharp point, adapted for screwing into wood; a screw for fastening lags.
• transitive verb Slang, Eng. To transport for crime.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• adjective late
• noun countable A gap, a delay; an interval created by something not keeping up; a latency.