Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. A shotgun whose barrel(s) has been shortened to give a larger spread, though with more limited range (often for illegal purposes)
Usage examples of "sawn-off shotgun".
Jackie Crawford was somewhere in this crowd, somewhere shaking hands with people whom, a scant four years before, he might have been terrorising with a sawn-off shotgun.
I turned my head and saw the little Indian, still in black but without his jacket now, sitting on the other side of the hatch with his sawn-off shotgun across his knees.
Luigi reached under the bar and pulled out a sap and a sawn-off shotgun, and an old Colt Peacemaker.
But it was far too late for warnings, or for prisoners to suggest what police escorts should do, when the barrels of a sawn-off shotgun rammed through the open driver's window and ground viciously into the young constable's throat while, simultaneously, two straddle-legged figures appeared at the tailgate of the Land Rover, levelling a Spanish Z-6z and a Czech - or maybe it was a Polish submachine gun at its other occupants.
The pea jacket was unbuttoned and from under it he brought out a sawn-off shotgun.
Rupert was standing beside him clutching a sawn-off shotgun and Harry, the barman from the Bull and Bell, appeared in the loft at the other side of the building, some sort of revolver in his hand.
A sawn-off shotgun spreads so quickly that I hadn't a hope in hell of really hurting him where he stood which was a good twenty paces away.