saw
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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3 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "saw", 3-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "saw" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "saw" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
saw is aEnglishnoun. It means: A tool with a toothed blade used for cutting hard substances, in particular wood or metal. Pronounced /sɑ/. It ranks #459 in English word frequency. Often confused with so and se.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | saw |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /sɑ/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #459 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for saw is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /sɑ/. Corpus data places it at rank #459 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for saw in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "so", "se", "SC", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: The noun from Middle English sawe, sawgh, from Old English saga, sagu (“saw”), from Proto-West Germanic *sagu, from Proto-Germanic *sagô, *sagō (“saw”), from Proto-Indo-European *sek- (“to cut”). Cognate with West Frisian seage (“saw”), Dutch zaag (“saw”), … Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is saw, spelled S-A-W, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A tool with a toothed blade used for cutting hard substances, in particular wood or metal.
- 2A tool with a toothed blade used for cutting hard substances, in particular wood or metal.
- 3A musical saw.
- 4A sawtooth wave.
- 5The situation where two partners agree to trump a suit alternately, playing that suit to each other for the express purpose.
Etymology
The noun from Middle English sawe, sawgh, from Old English saga, sagu (“saw”), from Proto-West Germanic *sagu, from Proto-Germanic *sagô, *sagō (“saw”), from Proto-Indo-European *sek- (“to cut”). Cognate with West Frisian seage (“saw”), Dutch zaag (“saw”), German Säge (“saw”), Danish sav (“saw”), Swedish såg (“saw”), Icelandic sög (“saw”), and through Indo-European, with Latin secō (“cut”) and Italian sega (“saw”). The verb from Middle English sawen, from the noun above.
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #459 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: