Word.ws English Dictionary

Tom Sawyer

Tom Sawyer proper noun: the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a popular 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a young boy growing up in the Antebellum South on the Mississippi River.

tom sawyer: the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a popular 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a young boy growing up in...
Image: True Williams, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Proper noun

Tom Sawyer

  1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a popular 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a young boy growing up in the Antebellum South on the Mississippi River.

Verb

Tom Sawyer (third-person singular simple present Tom Sawyers, present participle Tom Sawyering, simple past and past participle Tom Sawyered)

  1. To convince someone to volunteer, especially to do something which one should do oneself.

Forms of Tom Sawyer

third-person singular presentTom Sawyers
present participleTom Sawyering
past participleTom Sawyered
pastTom Sawyered

Origin of Tom Sawyer

The verb is a reference to the title character of the novel.

Words formed from Tom Sawyer

Questions about Tom Sawyer

What does Tom Sawyer mean?
Tom Sawyer means the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a popular 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a young boy growing up in the Antebellum South on the Mississippi River.
What part of speech is Tom Sawyer?
Tom Sawyer can be a proper noun or a verb.

Words near Tom Sawyer in the dictionary

  1. Tom o' Bedlam
  2. Tom o' Bedlams
  3. Tom of Bedlam
  4. Tom of Bedlam's man
  5. Tom of Bedlam's men
  6. Tom Sawyer
  7. Tom Sawyered
  8. Tom Sawyeresque
  9. Tom Sawyering
  10. Tom Sawyers
  11. Tom Swiftie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Tom Sawyer (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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