bag [ME] The origin of bag is uncertain but it may come from an old Scandinavian word. Some phrases in English come from its use to mean a hunter’s game bag, such as having something in the bag [E20th], ‘as good as secured’. Another sense, ‘a particular interest or distinctive style’, as in ‘Dance music isn’t really my bag’, is probably jazz slang of the late 1950s. In the sense ‘an unattractive woman’, bag or old bag was originally American, and was first recorded in the 1890s.