Brew
verbTo make a drink such as beer, tea, or coffee by boiling, steeping, or fermenting; figuratively, for something troublesome to develop.
How to spell brew
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce brew
What does brew mean?
- verbTo make a drink such as beer, tea, or coffee by boiling, steeping, or fermenting; figuratively, for something troublesome to develop.
- nounA drink that has been brewed, especially beer or tea.
Brew in a sentence
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verb
She likes to brew a strong pot of coffee before her early shift.
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noun
After the long hike they relaxed with a cold brew on the porch.
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verb
The small farm started to brew its own beer for the weekend market.
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noun
He poured himself a hot brew and settled in to read.
Where does brew come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Brew comes from the Old English verb breowan, meaning to make a drink by boiling and fermenting grain, and it traces back to a Proto-Germanic root brewwan that carried the sense of warming or heating, the same idea that gives us 'broth' and 'bread'. Because making beer and ale meant heating liquids over a fire, the word always sat close to ideas of warmth and bubbling. The spelling settled on the unusual '-ew' ending the way several native English verbs did, sitting alongside 'chew', 'crew', and 'screw'. Over time the meaning widened beyond beer to cover the steeping of tea and coffee, and figuratively to trouble or a storm that is gathering. The word has Germanic cousins across Europe, including the German 'brauen', showing how old and widely shared the brewing tradition is.
How the word is built
- brew (from Old English breowan, to brew); single native root with no affixes
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