Word.ws English Dictionary

hawkshaw

hawkshaw noun: a detective.

Noun

hawkshaw (plural hawkshaws)

  1. (dated, obsolete) A detective.

Proper noun capitalized: Hawkshaw

Hawkshaw

  1. A surname.
    • Not only has front woman Kirsty Hawkshaw replaced her space-age baldness with a glamorous new look, but the music that fills the act's EastWest album is far more complex and substantial […]1994, Billboard, volume 106, number 24, page 26
  2. A village in the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, Greater Manchester, England (OS grid ref SD7515).
  3. A suburb of Darwen, Blackburn with Darwen district, Lancashire, England (OS grid ref SD6823).
  4. A tiny settlement on the Tweed, south-west of Tweedsmuir, Scottish Borders council area, Scotland, at the mouth of Hawkshaw Burn (OS grid ref NT0722)
  5. A community in York County, New Brunswick, Canada.
  6. A government town near Moockra, South Australia.

Forms of hawkshaw

pluralhawkshaws

Origin of hawkshaw

From Hawkshaw the Detective, a character in Tom Taylor's 1863 play The Ticket of Leave Man. The name was later borrowed in the early 20th century for a character in an American comic strip.

Questions about hawkshaw

What does hawkshaw mean?
Hawkshaw means a detective.
What part of speech is hawkshaw?
Hawkshaw can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of hawkshaw?
The plural of hawkshaw is hawkshaws.

Words near hawkshaw in the dictionary

  1. hawksbill sea turtles
  2. hawksbill turtle
  3. hawksbill turtles
  4. hawksbills
  5. hawksbit
  6. hawkshaw
  7. hawkshaws
  8. Hawkshead
  9. Hawksheads
  10. Hawksian
  11. Hawksworth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hawkshaw (page history and authors); Hawkshaw (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hawkshaw.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hawkshaw. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.