Word.ws English Dictionary

polliwig

polliwig 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 polliwig

pluralpolliwigs

Questions about polliwig

What is polliwig the obsolete form of?
Polliwig is the obsolete form of pollywog.

Words near polliwig in the dictionary

  1. pollists
  2. Pollitt
  3. Pollitts
  4. polliwag
  5. polliwags
  6. polliwig
  7. polliwiggle
  8. polliwiggles
  9. polliwigs
  10. polliwog
  11. polliwogs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polliwig (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.

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