Hew
Contents
English
Verb
Hew (third-person singular simple present hews, present participle hewing, simple past hewed or rarely hew, past participle hewed or hewn)
- (transitive) To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
- 1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs , Tarzan of the Apes , Chapter 6
- 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.
- 1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs , Tarzan of the Apes , Chapter 6
- (transitive) To shape; to form.
- (transitive, US) To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with to.
- 1905, Albert Osborn, John Fletcher Hurst: A Biography,[1] 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,[2] 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, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik,[3] 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, […]
- 1905, Albert Osborn, John Fletcher Hurst: A Biography,[1] Jennings & Graham, page 428,
Derived terms
Adverbs for Hew
roughly; bravely; ambitiously; vigorously; industriously; stalwartly; robustly; untiringly.
Thesaurus
amputate, ax, bisect, block out, blow down, blow over, bowl down, bowl over, bring down, bulldog, butcher, carve, cast, cast down, chisel, chop, chop down, cleave, create, cut, cut away, cut down, cut in two, cut off, dash down, deck, dichotomize, dissever, down, drop, efform, excise, fashion, fell, fetch down, figure, fissure, fix, floor, forge, form, formalize, found, frame, gash, ground, hack, halve, hew down, incise, jigsaw, knead, knock down, knock out, lance, lay level, lay low, lay out, level, lick into shape, mint, model, mold, mow down, pare, precipitate, prostrate, prune, pull down, rase, raze, rend, rive, rough out, roughcast, roughhew, saw, scissor, sculpt, sculpture, send headlong, set, sever, shape, slash, slice, slit, snip, split, spread-eagle, stamp, sunder, supinate, tailor, take down, tear, thermoform, throw, throw down, topple, trip, tumble, whack down, whittle, work
Etymology
From Middle English hewen, from Old English hēawan, from Proto-Germanic *hawwanan, from Proto-Indo-European *kehₐu- (“to strike, hew, forge”). Cognate with Scots hew, hewe, West Frisian houwe, Dutch houwen, German hauen, Swedish hugga, Icelandic höggva; and with Latin cūdō (“strike, beat, pound, forge”), Lithuanian {{ Template:Lit/script |káuti| face=term | lang=lit }} (“to beat, forge”). See also hoe.
Pronunciation
Translations
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