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Glite Dictionary
💵 A ten-dollar bill 🪚 A wood holder
sawbuck

sawbuck

1 9.9
A ten-dollar bill in informal American English
  • noun
  • /ˈsɔːˌbʌk/
  • Archaic
translation icon : dólar
  • You got a sawbuck on you?

Examples

  • - A sawbuck?

    Tough Guys (1986)

  • Do you have a sawbuck to lend me for lunch?

  • The next week, he hit me up for a sawbuck to get him through the week.

    Blog text (27)

  • You had me figured for a sawbuck.

    The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984)

  • It costs a sawbuck to walk down this street.

    Tough Guys (1986)

  • "Sure you don't want the double sawbuck?"

    Fiction book (2001)

  • Freddy, how 'bout a double sawbuck for the case?

    Atlantic City (1980)

  • Usually, when I came in the next morning, there were a few empties on the bar and a sawbuck on the register, and in return, Milt drank free whenever I was there.

    Fiction book (2000)

  • He offered me a sawbuck to help him buy a new game.

  • She found a sawbuck crumpled in her jacket pocket.

Surface Forms

sawbuck singular
sawbucks plural

Morphology

sawbuck = saw + buck (opaque) = saw + buck

Although the slang sense is historically linked to the sawbuck frame, the meaning 'ten-dollar bill' is a later conventionalized extension that is not compositionally recoverable.

Etymology

Sawbuck is also American slang for a ten-dollar bill. A helpful way to remember this is that the tool called a sawbuck is X-shaped, like the Roman numeral 'X' for 'ten', so people began calling the $10 note a sawbuck.