Haw

How to spell haw

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce haw

What does haw mean?

1. verbTo pause and make an indistinct sound while struggling to decide what to say.

Haw in a sentence

• Witnesses tend to hem and haw when they are unsure of the dates.

• The manager tends to hem and haw whenever the salary question comes up.

Where does haw come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word actually braids together a couple of separate origins that happen to share the spelling. The plant sense, the small red fruit of the hawthorn, descends from the Old English haga, which meant a hedge or an enclosure; because hawthorn was the classic hedging shrub, its berry came to be called the haw, and the same haga gives us the first half of 'hawthorn' itself. The hesitation sense, as in to 'hem and haw', is imitative in origin, simply spelling out the throat-clearing, stalling noise people make while groping for words, and it is recorded in English from around the seventeenth century. The driver's command sense, used to turn a horse or ox to the left (paired with 'gee' for right), is of obscure and probably dialectal origin. Because the word is so short, the only real spelling trap is the -aw ending, which in non-rhotic British speech makes it sound like 'hoar' or 'whore', so the meaning is what tells you it is spelled h-a-w.

How the word is built

• haw (a single Old English root, haga; no prefix or suffix)