sawbones

Other forms of sawbones

plural

sawboneses·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about sawbones

What does sawbones mean?

sawbones means "a physician who specializes in surgery".

How many syllables are in sawbones?

sawbones has 2 syllables and divides as saw-bones under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for sawbones?

Close synonyms include surgeon, operating surgeon. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is sawbones a common word?

sawbones is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.