Hew

 WORD OF THE DAY

hew / verb / HYOO

Definition

1: to cut with blows of a heavy cutting instrument

2: to cut down by blows of an ax

3: to give form or shape to with or as if with heavy cutting blows

4: conform, adhere

Examples

While Michelan­gelo would later claim that he had raced back to Florence from Rome when the fledgling Florentine republic announced that it would be commissioning a new work to be hewn from a giant block of marble in its possession, the fact of the matter was that the block … had defied several generations of sculptors who had chipped away at its base...." 

— Victoria Coates, The National Review, 27 Dec. 2021

Months after vaccination, researchers can still see evidence of B cells trying to hew their antibodies into better weapons, just in case the virus returns.

— Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 2 Dec. 2021

Did You Know?

Hew is a strong, simple word of Anglo-Saxon descent. It can suggest actual ax-wielding, or it can be figurative: "If … our ambition hews and shapes [our] new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor in garden-beds" (Ralph Waldo Emerson). 

It's easy to see how the figurative "shape" sense of hew developed from the literal "hacking" sense, but what does chopping have to do with adhering and conforming? 

That sense first appeared in the late 1800s in the phrase "hew to the line." The "hew line" is a line marked along the length of a log indicating where to chop in order to shape a beam. 

"Hewing to the line," literally, is cutting along the mark—adhering to it—until the side of the log is squared.