Saw

How to spell saw

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce saw

What does saw mean?

1. verbThe simple past tense of 'see': perceived something with the eyes.
2. nounA hand or power tool with a toothed blade used for cutting wood, metal, or other material.
3. verbTo cut something using a saw, or with a back-and-forth motion.

Saw in a sentence

• verb

  She saw the delivery van pull into the driveway this morning.

• noun

  He reached for the saw to cut the floorboard to length.

• verb

  We need to saw the plank in half before fitting the shelf.

• verb

  I saw the report on your desk before the meeting started.

• noun

  A sharp saw makes far less effort than a blunt one when cutting timber.

• verb

  It took an hour to saw through the thick oak branch.

Where does saw come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The spelling 'saw' actually covers several words that fell together. The cutting tool comes from Old English 'sagu' or 'sage', from a Germanic root *sagō meaning literally 'a cutting instrument', tied to a verb sense of slicing or cutting; the same family gives German 'Sage' and relates to Latin 'secare' meaning 'to cut'. The verb 'to saw', meaning to cut with such a tool, grew directly out of that noun. Quite separately, 'saw' as the past tense of 'see' descends from Old English 'seah', the past form of 'seon' ('to see'), so its 'aw' spelling is a historical accident of sound change rather than any link to cutting. A fourth, older sense, 'saw' meaning a wise saying or proverb (as in 'an old saw'), comes from Old English 'sagu', meaning 'a saying' or 'tale', and is a cousin of the word 'say'. All of these arrived in English from its native Germanic stock rather than through borrowing.

How the word is built

• saw (a single Old English root, not built from affixes; the tool sense from Germanic *sagō, the past-tense sense from the verb 'see')