fag

In textile inspections, a rough or coarse defect in the woven fabric.

A cigarette.

He′d Phase Out Fag Industry Los Angeles (UPI) - A UCLA professor has called for the phasing out of the cigarette industry by converting tobacco acres to other crops.

Oh, rent a flat above a shop / And cut your hair and get a job / And smoke some fags and play some pool / Pretend you never went to school

The worst part or end of a thing.

Fag, s. the worst part or end of anything.

A chore: an arduous and tiresome task.

We are sadly off in the country; not but what we have very good shops in Salisbury, but it is so far to go—eight miles is a long way; Mr. Allen says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than eight; and it is such a fag—I come back tired to death.

Keeping up appearances is a bit of a fag, I grant, but if a girl respects herself it’s up to her not to let herself get slack.

A younger student acting as a servant for senior students.

I had the character at ſchool of being the very beſt fag that ever came into it.

“He was my fag at Eton,” Warrington said. “I ought to have licked him a little more.”

To make exhausted, tired out.

To droop; to tire.

a. 1829, G. Mackenzie, Lives, quoted in 1829, "Fag", entry in The London Encyclopaedia: Or, Universal Dictionary, Volume 9, page 12, Creighton with-held his force 'till the Italian began to fag, and then brought him to the ground.

Of a younger student, to act as a servant for senior students in many British boarding schools.

To have (a younger student) act as a servant in this way.

It is everywhere observed that a liberated slave is apt to make a merciless master, and that boys who have been cruelly fagged at school are cruel faggers.

To work hard, especially on menial chores.

This state of things should have been to me a paradise of peace, accustomed as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging; but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such a state that no calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably.

I walked about the streets where the best shops for ladies were, I haunted the Bazaar like an unquiet spirit, I fagged through the Park again and again, long after I was quite knocked up.