Clutch

How to spell clutch

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce clutch

What does clutch mean?

1. verbTo grasp or hold something tightly, often out of fear or urgency.
2. nounThe pedal or mechanism that engages and disengages the engine from the transmission in a manual vehicle.
3. nounA small, flat handbag carried without a strap.
4. nounA group of eggs laid or incubated together, or the brood of chicks hatched from them.

Clutch in a sentence

• verb

  She would clutch her handbag whenever the train got crowded.

• noun

  The mechanic said the worn clutch would cost a lot to replace.

• noun

  She chose a silver clutch to match her evening dress.

• noun

  The hen settled over a clutch of seven warm eggs.

• verb

  The toddler began to clutch his mother's coat in the busy market.

• noun

  Learning to balance the clutch and the accelerator took several lessons.

Where does clutch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The verb comes from the Old English clyccan, meaning 'to bring together' or 'to clench the hand', a word rooted in the same Germanic family that gave us 'clench' and 'cling'. Its earliest sense was the physical one of gripping something hard with the fingers, and from that grasping action came the figurative idea of seizing an opportunity or holding on in desperation. The mechanical sense, the device that engages and disengages a vehicle's transmission, arose in the nineteenth century precisely because the part 'grips' the spinning shaft. The 'group of eggs' meaning has a separate and surprising history: it is a variant of the dialect word 'cletch', from the Old Norse klekja 'to hatch', and only later got reshaped to match the spelling of the grasping word. Because the core is a single solid Anglo-Saxon syllable, the spelling rarely shifts, though the silent build of the 'tch' ending is the only mild snag.

How the word is built

• clutch (from Old English clyccan: to clench or grasp)