Definition of "sawn-off" [sawn-off]

• Cut short (adjective)
• Well below average height (adjective)

WordNet. Princeton University. 2010.

• "I walk through East London every morning to get to work, and sometimes you can see the terrors of war superimposed on the modern landscape -- the sawn-off stubs of the iron railings that were harvested "for the war effort" (and dumped in the Channel without being turned into munitions after all), the single handsome old building stuck like an old tooth in the gleaming modern denture-work of sterile, post-War neubauten."
• "Or are the refs armed with chainsaws and sawn-off shotguns?"
• "He says that at the trial the police tried to fit him up by charging him as though it were a sawn-off shotgun which carried an automatic year's prison sentence."