Why do we call a ten-dollar bill a sawbuck? The support for woodworking known as a sawbuck folds out into the shape of an X, the same shape as the Roman numeral for ten. Hence, the slang term for the currency worth ten bucks. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Give Me A Sawbuck”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there, this is Bill.
I live near Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains.
How nice.
Beautiful country, welcome to the show.
Well, up here we burn quite a bit of wood, either for heat in the wintertime or as a supplement to our heat.
And I burn wood, and I have a saw box.
And I use that to hold the logs when I’m cutting the logs to stove length.
And I’ve also heard the term applied to money, usually paper money.
And I was just wondering how the two terms got to be the way they are.
So tell us what your saw buck looks like.
Well, it’s got four legs.
It’s kind of an X frame.
Actually, mine has six, so I can make several cuts at a time.
But it usually has four legs, and it holds the log in place.
Okay, so this is a wooden structure, and it’s supported by X-shaped things, correct?
Right.
Okay, beautiful.
Well, if you go back to ancient Rome and ancient Roman numerals, you know what the 10 looks like?
Right, okay.
It’s an X, yes.
Yeah.
It’s an X, yeah, all right.
And that got applied to the $10 bill, so that’s why we call a $10 bill a sawbuck.
It has to do with the shape of the legs on a sawbuck.
Oh, so the shape of the leg matches the Roman numeral.
Yep.
And the Roman numeral represents the 10.
Therefore, 10 is a sawbuck.
Right.
So your kid is going to be asking you to lend him a sawbuck for the weekend, or probably several sawbucks.
Right, yes.
Well, I had no idea that that’s where it came from, from the shape of the sawbuck.
Okay.
Yeah, but it makes sense, right?
It sure does.
Well, Bill, thank you a lot for calling.
Thanks, Bill.
Thank you very much.
All right, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
You know, you also hear sawbuck used in terms of prison sentences, like, oh, he got a sawbuck.
Ten years.
A couple of sawbucks.
Yeah, 20 years.
Okay, very good.
Yeah, sawbuck.
877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.
Maybe forty years ago, there was a column in Playboy magazine (See, I WAS reading it for the articles!) that discussed the “Land of Dixie” They said that in the French Quarter, a ten-spot was used that had big “X”s and the word “dix” on it. Dixieland was the area in which those bills circulated, rather than the land south of the Mason-Dixon line. They also claimed that’s where the term “sawbuck” came from.
The “Playboy Advisor” didn’t cite sources, but they seemed to be pretty reliable.