Word.ws English Dictionary

pollywig

pollywig 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 pollywig

pluralpollywigs

Questions about pollywig

What is pollywig the obsolete form of?
Pollywig is the obsolete form of pollywog.

Words near pollywig in the dictionary

  1. pollyfox
  2. pollyfoxed
  3. pollyfoxes
  4. pollyfoxing
  5. pollyspeak
  6. pollywig
  7. pollywigs
  8. pollywog
  9. pollywogged
  10. pollywogging
  11. pollywogs

Source and license

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