laws

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of law.

   Lawmakers passed three environmental laws in a single session.

   The country's labor laws protect workers from unfair dismissal.

   Note

   Counting the rules one by one: law as a whole system is usually uncountable and takes the (break the law), while laws picks out individual statutes or regulations. The plural also carries the broader meanings: rules of conduct that ought to be obeyed, and principles governing language or art, as in the laws of grammar or of perspective. The same spelling also serves as the verb form.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of law.

   Note

   This verb form's meaning depends on register. In dialect, someone who laws a neighbor is suing them. In informal use, to law can simply mean to enforce the law, and the older sense of practicing as a lawyer is obsolete. Only the sense of subjecting something to legal restrictions is unmarked, so in neutral writing sue, regulate or govern usually serves better.

3. 3
   nounslangUS

   The police, or law-enforcement officers, in slang.

   He kept watch for the laws while the others worked.

   By the time the laws arrived, the crowd had scattered.

   Similarcops, police, fuzz

   Note

   An uncommon piece of US street slang. It treats the police as a crowd of officers rather than as an institution, and it nearly always comes with the, as in watching for the laws. Because it shares its spelling with the ordinary plural, context does the work of telling them apart. Outside casual street talk, police or officers is the safer choice.

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