Word.ws English Dictionary

soft sawder

soft sawder noun: cajoling or flattery.

Noun

soft sawder (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic, obsolete) Cajoling or flattery.
    • If she goes to act ugly, I'll give her a dose of "soft sawder"; that will take the frown out of her frontispiece...!1836, Thomas Haliburton, "The Trotting Horse" (1836) — first usage
    • A sorrowful spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and soft sawder, which he and others took for something divine and not diabolic!1850, Thomas Carlyle, “The present time”, in Latter-Day Pamphlets

Origin of soft sawder

Phonetic spelling of soft solder; that is, solder that melts at a lower temperature. Coined by Thomas Haliburton in the short story "The Trotting Horse" (1836). Popular in the 19th century, but out of common use by 1950.

Questions about soft sawder

What does soft sawder mean?
Soft sawder means cajoling or flattery.
What part of speech is soft sawder?
Soft sawder is a noun.

Words near soft sawder in the dictionary

  1. soft room
  2. soft rooms
  3. soft rot
  4. soft rush
  5. soft rushes
  6. soft sawder
  7. soft scale
  8. soft scales
  9. soft science
  10. soft science fiction
  11. soft sciences

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: soft sawder (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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