Word.ws English Dictionary

swads

swads is the plural of swad.

Meaning of swad

Noun

swad (plural swads)

  1. A bunch, clump, mass
    • "[…]Ye'd oughta see th' swad a' chil'ren I've got, an' all like that."1895 October, Stephen Crane, chapter X, in The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC, page 102
    Synonyms:
    bunch, clump, mass
  2. (obsolete, slang) A crowd; a group of people.
  3. (obsolete) A boor, lout.
    • Sham’st thou not coistrel, loathsome dunghill swad.1591, unknown author, The Troublesome Reign of King John, scene 2
  4. A thin layer of refuse at the bottom of a seam.
  5. (Northern, UK, dialectal, obsolete) A cod, or pod, as of beans or peas.
    • They must bee gathered in the decrease of the moone, presently vpon their being ripe, for else they drie vp and fall out of their swads:1600, Charles Estienne, Maison Rustique, Or The Covntrie Farme, page 695

Questions about swads

What is swads the plural of?
Swads is the plural of swad.

Words near swads in the dictionary

  1. swadges
  2. swadging
  3. Swadley
  4. Swadleys
  5. Swadlincote
  6. swads
  7. Swaffham
  8. Swaffham Bulbeck
  9. Swaffham Prior
  10. Swafford
  11. Swaffords

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: swads (page history and authors); swad (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: “swads.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/swads. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.