hew
See also: Hew
English
Etymology 1
From Middle English hewen, from Old English hēawan, from Proto-West Germanic *hauwan, from Proto-Germanic *hawwaną, from Proto-Indo-European *kewh₂- (“to strike, hew, forge”).
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /hjuː/, /hjuʊ̯/
Audio (UK) (file)
- Rhymes: -uː
- Homophones: hue, Hiw, Hugh
Verb
hew (third-person singular simple present hews, present participle hewing, simple past hewed or (rare) hew, past participle hewed or hewn)
- (transitive, intransitive) To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
- 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, OCLC 606515358, [Act IV, scene vii]:
- Hew them to pieces, hack their bones asunder […]
- 1912 October, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., OCLC 17392886; republished as chapter 6, in Tarzan of the Apes, New York, N.Y.: A. L. Burt Company, 1914, OCLC 1224185:
- Among other things he found a sharp hunting knife, on the keen blade of which he immediately proceeded to cut his finger. Undaunted he continued his experiments, finding that he could hack and hew splinters of wood from the table and chairs with this new toy.
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- (transitive) To shape; to form.
- One of the most widely used typefaces in the world was hewn by the English printer and typographer John Baskerville.
- to hew out a sepulchre
- 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], OCLC 964384981, Isaiah 51:1:
- Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn.
- December 19, 1734, Alexander Pope, letter to Jonathan Swift
- rather polishing old works than hewing out new
- December 15 2022, Samanth Subramanian, “Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site”, in The Guardian:
- Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridge’s length off Finland’s south-west coast.
- (transitive, US) To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with to.
- 1905, Albert Osborn, John Fletcher Hurst: A Biography, Jennings & Graham, page 428
- Few men measured up to his standard of righteousness; he hewed to the line.
- 1998, Frank M. Robinson; Lawrence Davidson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines, Collectors Press, Inc., →ISBN, page 103:
- Inside the stories usually hewed to a consistent formula: no matter how outlandish and weird the circumstances, in the end everything had to have a natural, if not plausible, ending—frequently, though not always, involving a mad scientist.
- 2008, Chester E. Finn, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 28
- Faculty members and students alike were buzzing with the fashionable nostrums that dominated U.S. education discourse in the late sixties, […] These hewed to the recommendations of the Plowden Report, […]
- 2012 May 27, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “New Kid on the Block” (season 4, episode 8; originally aired 11/12/1992)”, in The Onion AV Club:
- Hewing to the old comedy convention of beginning a speech by randomly referencing something in eyesight, Homer begins his talk about the birds and the bees by saying that women are like refrigerators: they’re all about six feet tall and weigh three hundred pounds and make ice cubes.
- 2013 October 2, Pappademas, Alex, “Leuqes! LEUQES! LEUQES! – The Shining sequel and what it says about Stephen King”, in Grantland.com, retrieved 2013-10-16:
- King recovered the rights on the condition that he'd stop publicly disparaging Kubrick's version. "For a long time I hewed that line," he told CBS News in June. "And then Mr. Kubrick died. So now I figured, what the hell. I've gone back to saying mean things about it."
- 1905, Albert Osborn, John Fletcher Hurst: A Biography, Jennings & Graham, page 428
Derived terms
- behew
- forhew
- hewer
- hewn
- rough-hew
Translations
to chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down
|
to shape; to form
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to act according to
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Noun
hew (countable and uncountable, plural hews)
- (obsolete) Destruction by cutting down or hewing.
- 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book VI, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, OCLC 960102938, stanza 49:
- Of whom he makes such hauocke and such hew, / That swarmes of damned soules to hell he sends
-
Etymology 2
See hue.
Noun
hew (countable and uncountable, plural hews)
- (obsolete) Hue; colour.
- (obsolete) Shape; form.
- 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, OCLC 960102938, stanza 46:
- He taught to imitate that Lady trew,
- Whose semblance she did carrie under feigned hew.
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Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for hew in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913)
Anagrams
- weh
Zaghawa
Noun
hew
- baboon
References
- Beria-English English-Beria Dictionary [provisional] ADESK, Iriba, Kobe Department, Chad