Chew

Most of us do it every day, but do we think about the word? Here's a gander at the verb chew.

Not surprisingly, our modern word chew started out meaning to bite, gnaw or chew when it made its way from one of the Germanic languages into Old English, where it was spelled ceowan.

Both chow (1500s) & chaw (1520) are variants of the word chew. It’s also very likely that jaw (1300s), jowl (1570) and cheek (825) were born of that Old English word ceowan.

In other chew-related news, the Proto-Indo-European word mendh- which became the Latin word mandele, meaning to chew, gave birth to mandible, munch, mastic, masticate, mustache, paper maché & mange (a tiny bit of mildly disturbing imagination will help connect those dots).

Ruminate entered English in the 1530s, from Latin, meaning to chew the cud or turn over in the mind.

Champ, which came to English in 1905, meaning to chew noisily, is probably onomatopoeic in origin.

English is rife with chew-inspired idioms, including:

Chew someone out
Chew the fat
Chew something over
Chew something up
Bite off more than one can chew
Chew away at something
Chew one’s cud
Chew one’s tobacco
Mad enough to chew nails (in my neighborhood, we spat nails in lieu of chewing them)

I hope this post has given you something on which to chew. If so, please let me know what you’re thinking in the comment section.



My thanks go out to this week’s sources the OED, Free Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, & Etymonline,