Word.ws English Dictionary

tawse

/tɔːz/

tawse noun: a leather strap or thong which is split into (typically three) tails, used for corporal punishment in schools, applied to the palm of the hands or buttocks.

tawse: a leather strap or thong which is split into (typically three) tails, used for corporal punishment...
Image: Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

tawse (plural tawses)

  1. (Scotland) A leather strap or thong which is split into (typically three) tails, used for corporal punishment in schools, applied to the palm of the hands or buttocks.
    • I lay about me with the taws
      That night and morning I may thrash
      Greek Alexander from my flesh, […]1919 March, W[illiam] B[utler] Yeats, “The Saint and the Hunchback”, in The Wild Swans at Coole, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, pages 104–105
    • [W]hile James Murray might punish a late comer by a stroke on the palm of the hand, the children found his lessons so interesting that he had no need to resort to the "tawse", the traditional leather strap, that descended on the shoulders of Mr Dodds' pupils at the United school.1977, K.M. Elizabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 31

Verb

tawse (third-person singular simple present tawses, present participle tawsing, simple past and past participle tawsed)

  1. (Scotland, transitive) To beat with a tawse.

Forms of tawse

Noun
pluraltawses
alternative formtaws
Verb
third-person singular presenttawses
present participletawsing
past participletawsed
pasttawsed

Origin of tawse

Apparently a plural form of taw, though attested earlier.

Words that rhyme with tawse

7 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about tawse

What does tawse mean?
Tawse means a leather strap or thong which is split into (typically three) tails, used for corporal punishment in schools, applied to the palm of the hands or buttocks.
What part of speech is tawse?
Tawse can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce tawse?
Tawse is pronounced /tɔːz/.
What is the plural of tawse?
The plural of tawse is tawses.

Words near tawse in the dictionary

  1. tawriya
  2. tawriyah
  3. tawriyahs
  4. tawriyas
  5. taws
  6. tawse
  7. tawsed
  8. tawses
  9. tawsing
  10. Tawstock
  11. tawyer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tawse (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tawse.wav.

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