It shows up in songs ("Check out my swag, yo / I walk like a ballplayer"-Jay Z) and social media hashtags, but this word derives from swagger, not from stolen goods. What about the other swag? That's a slang word that refers to stylish confidence. We've entered this "promotional items" sense of swag into our Unabridged Dictionary. Modern swag, however, isn't stolen but given freely. We have 17th-century evidence of a number of phrases from the underworld that use this sense of swag, like swag-shop (a shop selling goods) and rum swag (full of rich goods). It's likely that the "loot" sense of swag came into English from thieves' cant. Silverware in those days was the choicest swag known to burglars. The newer meanings were based on an older, more established meaning that referred to goods acquired by unlawful means: This swag didn't gain much use until the 1990s, but it also didn't appear out of thin air. In short order, this particular meaning of swag broadened and soon referred to anything given to an attendee of an event (such as a conference) as a promotional stunt.
#MYDICTIONARY SWAG FREE#
According to our files, early swag was everything from promotional records sent to radio stations to free slippers for airline passengers. The freebie swag, sometimes also spelled schwag, dates back to the 1960s and was used to describe promotional items. It's likely that the sense of swag which means "loot" comes from a term thieves used to describe stolen goods.
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