Word.ws English Dictionary

polliwog

polliwog is the alternative 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 polliwog

pluralpolliwogs

Questions about polliwog

What is polliwog the alternative form of?
Polliwog is the alternative form of pollywog.

Words near polliwog in the dictionary

  1. polliwags
  2. polliwig
  3. polliwiggle
  4. polliwiggles
  5. polliwigs
  6. polliwog
  7. polliwogs
  8. pollman
  9. Pollmans
  10. pollmeister
  11. pollmeisters

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polliwog (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: “polliwog.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/polliwog. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.