Polliwog

noun

noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A tadpole. US, dialectal

    "So Tommy sang the following verse: “The cold got worse, The frog got hoarse, Till croaking he scared a polliwog!”"

  2. 2
    a larval frog or toad wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
tadpoleamphibianbatrachianbirdlingbullfrogcalf

Example

More examples

"So Tommy sang the following verse: “The cold got worse, The frog got hoarse, Till croaking he scared a polliwog!”"

Etymology

From earlier polwigge, from Middle English polwygle, equal to poll (“head”) + wiggle.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.