Hew
Pronunciation
- IPA: /hjuË/
- Rhymes: -uË
- Homophones: hue
Origin 1
From Middle English hewen, from Old English hēawan, from Proto-Germanic *hawwaną, from Proto-Indo-European *keh₂u- ("to strike, hew, forge"). Cognate with Scots hew, hewe, West Frisian houwe, Dutch houwen, German hauen, Swedish hugga, Icelandic höggva; and with Latin cūdŠ("strike, beat, pound, forge"), Lithuanian káuti ("to beat, forge"), Albanian hu ("a club, pole"). See also hoe.
Full definition of hew
Verb
- (transitive) To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
- ShakespeareHew them to pieces; hack their bones asunder.
- 1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, Chapter 6Among 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.
- (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
- Bible, Is. li. 1Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn.
- Alexander Poperather polishing old works than hewing out new
- (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 and Lawrence Davidson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines, Collectors Press, Inc., ISBN 1-888054-12-3, 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, Jr., Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-12990-8, 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), 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. 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."