Sawyer

How to spell sawyer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sawyer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sawyer mean?

1. nounA person whose job is to saw timber into planks or boards.

Sawyer in a sentence

• The sawyer measured each log before cutting it into planks.

• The old mill employed a skilled sawyer to prepare the oak beams.

Where does sawyer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from native English roots and dates back to the Middle Ages. It is built on the Old English verb sagu or saw, meaning the toothed tool used to cut wood, combined with the agent ending that we still see in words like 'lawyer' and 'bowyer'. By the 1300s the form 'sawyere' was already in use to name the worker whose trade was cutting logs into planks, often in a pit where one man stood below and another above the timber. The unusual -yer spelling, rather than the more common -er, survives from this older agentive pattern and is the main thing that trips writers up today. The same line of work gave English the surname Sawyer, famously attached to Mark Twain's character Tom Sawyer, which keeps the word familiar even where the trade has faded.

How the word is built

• saw (to cut with a toothed blade)
• -yer (agent suffix, a variant of -er meaning 'one who does')