What does clewing mean?
Clewing is the present participle of the verb 'clew', a term that survives almost exclusively in sailing vocabulary. To clew a sail is to gather or draw it up by pulling on ropes attached to its lower corners — the clews — typically using the clewlines and clewgarnets. The orders 'clew up' and 'clew down' are traditional commands for shortening or adjusting sail, so a sailor might be described as clewing up the topsails as weather worsens. In older, non-maritime English, clewing also meant winding loose thread or yarn into a ball, a sense that has fallen out of use. The word's history explains the modern meaning of 'clue': a ball of thread was literally what you followed through a labyrinth, and that image gave us today's figurative 'clue' as a hint that guides you to an answer. Clewing thus preserves one of English's more vivid metaphors in its original, physical form.
verb (present participle and gerund of 'clew')The present participle of 'clew': to gather up or furl a sail by hauling on its clewlines, or more generally to wind yarn or thread into a ball.
- Hauling up or furling a sail by its clew (nautical usage, most common today)
- Winding thread or yarn into a ball (older, now rare)
"The crew spent the morning clewing up the topsails ahead of the storm."
"Orders rang out across the deck: hands to the halyards, clewing up the mainsail."
"She sat by the fire, patiently clewing the loose wool into a tidy ball."
Before 'clue' meant a hint in a detective story, it meant a ball of thread — the literal thread you'd follow out of a maze, which sailors still haul on when they're clewing up a sail.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of clewing
Clew derives from Old English 'cliewen', meaning a ball of thread or yarn, with cognates in other Germanic languages such as German 'Knäuel'. The nautical verb developed from the noun: because the lower corner of a sail was called its clew, hauling that corner up became 'to clew'. The spelling 'clue' arose as a variant, and it is this form that came to mean a guiding hint — famously from the thread that led Theseus out of the labyrinth — while 'clew' remained the preferred spelling at sea.
Related word forms
How clewing is actually used
Almost entirely confined to nautical contexts in modern English, where it appears in the fixed commands 'clew up' and 'clew down'. The spelling follows the base word: nautical tradition favors 'clew', while general usage has largely shifted to 'clue'. The non-nautical sense of winding thread into a ball is archaic.
Easily confused with clewing
'Cluing' is simply the spelling of the same verb when the base word is written 'clue' rather than 'clew'; the two are variants, not different meanings.