Word.ws English Dictionary

sawed-off

sawed-off adjective: shortened by sawing.

Adjective

sawed-off (not comparable)

  1. Shortened by sawing.
    • The sawed-off shotgun was illegal because its shorter barrel made it too easy to conceal.
  2. (slang) Short, as though truncated.
    • He was a sawed-off runt, just a little guy, but he packed so much attitude into that little package that no one was going to make anything about it.

Noun

sawed-off (plural sawed-offs)

  1. (US, slang) A shotgun with a barrel and sometimes buttstock which have been shortened by sawing them off; a sawed-off shotgun.
    • When I'm called off, I got a sawed-off / Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off1988, N.W.A. (Ice Cube), "Straight Outta Compton", Straight Outta Compton, 8 Aug 1998
    Synonyms:
    sawn-off

Synonyms of sawed-off

Forms of sawed-off

pluralsawed-offs

Phrases with sawed-off

Questions about sawed-off

What does sawed-off mean?
Sawed-off means shortened by sawing.
What part of speech is sawed-off?
Sawed-off can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near sawed-off in the dictionary

  1. sawed logs
  2. sawed off
  3. sawed off the branch one was sitting on
  4. sawed the baby in half
  5. sawed wood
  6. sawed-off
  7. sawed-off shotgun
  8. sawed-off shotguns
  9. sawed-offs
  10. sawer
  11. sawers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sawed-off (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sawed-off.ogg.

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