Oversaw
verbPast tense of oversee: supervised or watched over a task, group, or operation.
How to spell oversaw
7 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce oversaw
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does oversaw mean?
- verbPast tense of oversee: supervised or watched over a task, group, or operation.
Oversaw in a sentence
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She oversaw the entire renovation from start to finish.
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The manager oversaw a team of twelve sales staff last year.
Where does oversaw come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is the past tense of 'oversee', a thoroughly native English verb. It joins the Old English prefix 'ofer-', meaning 'above' or 'across', with 'seon', the ancestor of 'see', which originally meant simply 'to perceive with the eyes'. By combining looking with the idea of looking from above, the compound came to mean watching over work or people in a supervisory way, a sense recorded in English from the medieval period onward. The irregular past form 'oversaw' mirrors the strong verb 'saw' from 'see', which is why it does not take the regular '-ed' ending. The same Germanic root sits behind the modern noun 'oversight', and the spelling trap is simply remembering it ends in '-saw', exactly like the verb it is built on.
How the word is built
- over- (above, across)
- saw (past tense of see, from Old English seon 'to see')
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