laws
A minced oath standing in for 'Lord' — a softened exclamation used to express surprise, dismay, or exasperation without technically taking the Lord's name in vain.
Seen in the wild
I know in parts of Germany there are strict by-laws about when you can do it and certainly where I have been it is restricted to weekday early evenings.
Weirdness in WA, where local councils can apply to the state government for the right to have cat laws, but the state government has knocked back more than 20 such applications www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuffed President Trump's suggestion that members of the high court owe loyalty to the president who appointed them, saying that his loyalty is to the Constitution and the laws of t…
Oh, I think the loved following laws, when it supported slavery and then Jim Crow. The white supremacists must be overjoyed at the moment.
if they can't figure out how to follow and enforce laws, it's really the only remedy
Definitions
A minced oath standing in for 'Lord' — a softened exclamation used to express surprise, dismay, or exasperation without technically taking the Lord's name in vain. Common in older American rural speech. It also carries a street slang sense in some US communities where 'the laws' simply means the police — the long arm of the law personified into a single word. Two very different vibes, same spelling.
Laws, I haven't seen you in twenty years — you haven't aged a day!
Comments
(possibly, dated) A minced oath for Lord.
“I know in parts of Germany there are strict by-laws about when you can do it and certainly where I have been it is restricted to weekday early evenings.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“Weirdness in WA, where local councils can apply to the state government for the right to have cat laws, but the state government has knocked back more than 20 such applications www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...”
— Bluesky· May 2026“Why is it a liberal? Do you has made decisions on who they want in and out of their territory? The UK has made their own laws about who they wanted for how long? Why are we to tell the EU that they are wrong?”
— Bluesky· May 2026“#Pakistan 🇵🇰 Between January 2025 and April 2026, Pakistan Press Foundation has documented at least 233 instances of violence against journalists. It called for the active implementation of media safety laws at the federal and Sindh levels.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“Why did anyone want sodomy laws?”
— r/NoStupidQuestions· May 2026
Comments
(US, slang, street slang, uncommon) The police.
“Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch rebuffed President Trump's suggestion that members of the high court owe loyalty to the president who appointed them, saying that his loyalty is to the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“Oh, I think the loved following laws, when it supported slavery and then Jim Crow. The white supremacists must be overjoyed at the moment.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“if they can't figure out how to follow and enforce laws, it's really the only remedy”
— Bluesky· May 2026“The D.C. Council will hold its second and final vote Tuesday on the Juvenile Curfew Amendment Act of 2025, deciding whether to make the city’s curfew zone laws permanent.”
— Bluesky· May 2026“Three Inverse Laws of AI https://susam.net/inverse-laws-of-robotics.html”
— Bluesky· May 2026
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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Semantically related
- lawks72%
(UK, dialectal) Lord! (especially as an expression of surprise).
- lawks a-mercy71%
Lawks a-mercy is a delightfully old-school British exclamation of shock or surprise — a minced oath that softens 'Lord have mercy' into something you could say in polite company. It belongs to a golden era of Victorian and Edwardian interjections that sound almost comically theatrical today. Still used ironically or affectionately to poke fun at old-fashioned fussiness.
- lawks a-mercy68%
(UK) A minced oath for "Lord have mercy".
- Lan66%
' Lord,' used in exclamations and mild oaths.