Jaw

How to spell jaw

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jaw

What does jaw mean?

1. nounEither of the two bony structures that form the framework of the mouth and hold the teeth.
2. verbTo talk at length, especially in a casual or tiresome way.

Jaw in a sentence

• noun

  The boxer took a heavy blow to the jaw in the final round.

• verb

  The two neighbours would jaw over the fence for hours every evening.

• noun

  The dentist asked her to relax her lower jaw before the scan.

• verb

  He loves to jaw about his old cars to anyone who will listen.

Where does jaw come from?

Language of origin: French

The origins of jaw are genuinely murky, which is part of its charm. It appears in Middle English as jowe or jawe, but scholars have never settled on a single clean source. One leading view connects it to the Old French joue, meaning 'cheek', which would explain how a word for the side of the face came to mean the bony hinge of the mouth. Another view links it to the native English verb 'chew' (and its older form 'chaw'), the part of the body that does the chewing lending its name to the bone itself. Because these two threads ran together so early, the modern spelling settled on the short and tidy 'jaw' by the 1500s, and the later slang sense of endless talking grew naturally from the moving of the jaw while speaking. Given the rival theories, the true root remains uncertain.

How the word is built

• jaw (single root; from Middle English jowe, jawe, the lower facial bone)