hew
Part of speech: verb
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: 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”).
Cognate to West Frisian houwe (“to hew”), Cimbrian hauan (“to dig”), Dutch houwen (“to hew”), German hauen (“to hew”), Luxembourgish haen (“to chop”), Danish hugge (“to hew”), Faroese høgga (“to hew”), Icelandic höggva (“to hew”), Norwegian Bokmål hogge, hugge (“to hew”), Norwegian Nynorsk hogga (“to hew”), Swedish hugga (“to hew”).
Sense 3 derives from the phrase hew to the line (literally “cut evenly with an axe or saw”).
Inflected forms:
form: hews
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: hewing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: hewed
pos: verb
tags: past
form: hew
pos: verb
tags: past
rare
form: hewn
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: hewed
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: hewen
pos: verb
tags: archaic
participle
past
Senses:
gloss: To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
pos: verb
tags: ambitransitive
examples: Hew them to pieces, hack their bones asunder[…]
A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which he mounted.
So that all men despised him in the streets, / He hewed the living rock, with sweat and tears,
My ways are hard and rough, and my arms are strong and tough, / And I hew the dizzy pine till darkness falls;
She flung back the fortnight on his hands as if he had been an idler indifferent to dates, instead of an active young diplomatist who, to respond to her call, had had to hew his way through a very jungle of engagements!
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.
gloss: To shape; to form.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: to hew out a sepulchre
Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousnesse, ye that seeke the Lord: looke vnto the rocke whence yee are hewen, and to the hole of the pitte whence ye are digged.
Wisedome hath builded her house: she hath hewen out her seuen pillars.
rather polishing old works than hewing out new
The oak he had hauled was being hewed into shape by a neighbour who knew how, and every wagon that carried a log to the city to be dressed at the mill brought back timber for side walls, joists, and rafters.
In 1974, I spoke of poetry as “hewn from the commonest living substance” as a doorframe is hewn of wood.
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.
gloss: To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with to.
pos: verb
tags: US
transitive
examples: Few men measured up to his standard of righteousness; he hewed to the line.
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.
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, […]
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."
Derived words: behew
forehew
forhew
hewable
hew down
hewer
hewn
hew out
mishew
rehew
rough-hew
tohew
unhewed
Translations: