Other forms: saws, sawing
A saw is the tool with a toothed blade that cuts wood. A hand saw, a circular saw, cut it with a saw.
The kinds are named for the job: hacksaw for metal, jigsaw for curves, chainsaw for trees, tenon saw for joints. Which way the teeth point decides whether it cuts on the push or the pull, and Japanese saws cut on the pull. Saw is also the past tense of see, which is much the commoner word in speech. And a saw is an old proverb — an old saw — which is a different word entirely, from say.
1nounsawA tool with a toothed blade for cutting wood.~98%
“The saw is blunt and the wood is wet.”
2verbcutTo cut something with a saw.~2%
“He sawed the whole plank in about a minute.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English saga comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to cut, which also gives Latin secare and so English section, dissect and sickle. Every one of them is about cutting, and the saw is the oldest survivor.
Proto-Indo-European
*sek-
Middle English
sawe
English, today
saw
Built from
From Middle English sawe. The noun from Middle English sawe, sawgh, from Old English saga, sagu (“saw”), from Proto-West Germanic sagu, from Proto-Germanic sagô, sagō (“saw”), from Proto-Indo-European sek- (“to cut”). Cognate with West Frisian seage (“saw”), Dutch zaag (“saw”), German Säge (“saw”), Danish sav (“saw”), Faroese, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk sag (“saw”), Swedish såg (“saw”), Icelandic sög (“saw”), and through Indo-European, with Latin secō (“cut”) and Italian sega (“saw”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA