Chew

How to spell chew

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chew

What does chew mean?

1. verbTo grind or crush food with the teeth before swallowing.
2. nounA small item, often a sweet or a piece for an animal, meant to be worked over with the teeth.

Chew in a sentence

• verb

  The dentist told him to chew slowly on the left side while the filling settled.

• noun

  The puppy destroyed its rubber chew within a single afternoon.

• verb

  Toddlers learn to chew before they can manage solid meals.

• noun

  He kept a soft toffee chew in his coat pocket for the long train ride.

Where does chew come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Chew comes from the Old English verb ceowan, meaning 'to bite and grind something with the teeth', and it traces back to a Proto-Germanic root that also produced the Dutch kauwen and the German kauen, both meaning the same thing. The everyday sense has barely shifted in well over a thousand years: people have always chewed their food. The spelling is a useful guide to the sound, since the 'ew' ending here behaves much as it does in 'few' and 'new'. A close relative is the noun 'cud', the food a cow brings back up to chew again, which shares the same ancient family. Figurative phrases such as 'chew over' (to think something through) and 'chew out' (to scold) grew up around the literal action much later.

How the word is built

• chew (single Germanic root, from Old English ceowan: to bite and grind with the teeth)