Word.ws English Dictionary

poliwag

poliwag is the obsolete form of pollywog.

Meaning of pollywog

Noun

pollywog (plural pollywogs)

  1. (Canada, UK, US, dialectal) A tadpole.
    • So Tommy sang the following verse: “The cold got worse, The frog got hoarse, Till croaking he scared a polliwog!”1897, L. Frank Baum, “The Story of Tommy Tucker”, in Mother Goose in Prose
  2. (informal) A sailor who has not yet crossed the equator.
  3. (archaic, derogatory) An untrustworthy person, especially a politician.

See all 5 meanings of pollywog

Forms of poliwag

pluralpoliwags

Questions about poliwag

What is poliwag the obsolete form of?
Poliwag is the obsolete form of pollywog.

Words near poliwag in the dictionary

  1. politzerized
  2. politzerizes
  3. politzerizing
  4. Polivka
  5. Polivkas
  6. poliwag
  7. poliwags
  8. Poliwes
  9. Polizzi
  10. Polizzis
  11. polje

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: poliwag (page history and authors); pollywog (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.

Last updated:

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