sawed
- 1Simple past and past participle of saw.
The carpenter sawed through the thick oak beam with steady effort.
Once the branches were sawed off, the trunk was easy to move.
Note
The regular form of the cutting verb does double duty as past tense and past participle: she sawed the plank; the plank was sawed through. An older strong participle, sawn, survives beside it, especially before a noun, as in sawn timber. Because saw is also the past of see, the same spelling turns up in the joking dialect past of "see", and context, whether wood or a person, tells the two apart.
- 2Simple past of see. Dialectal or humorous; the standard form is saw.
We sawed the deer cross the road just before the bend.
Reckon I sawed your brother in town last week.
Note
This is a double past: saw is already the past of see, and dialect speech adds -ed on top. It replaces only the simple past, so after have the form is still seen. In print it signals a speaker's voice or a deliberate joke. Darnley: Or, The Field of the Cloth of Gold (1903) gives it to a sea captain: "I sawed him at the ale-house at Penzance with my own eye." In ordinary prose, write saw.
sawed is a form of saw
saw, verb: To cut, cut through, or shape something using a saw; (of a material) to be cut by a saw, especially in a particular way. Full entry
- Spelling
- saw → sawed: add -ed
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /d/.
Practice
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Origins
Formed by the regular addition of the past tense suffix "-ed" to "saw."
A nonstandard form made by adding "-ed" to "saw," which is itself already the strong past tense form of "see."