chaw
Pronunciation
  • IPA: /t͡ʃɔː/
Noun

chaw (plural chaws)

  1. (informal, uncountable) Chewing tobacco.
    When the doctor told him to quit smoking, Harvey switched to chaw, but then developed cancer of the mouth.
  2. (countable) A plug or wad of chewing tobacco.
  3. (obsolete) The jaw.
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto Four, stanza 30, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006, p. 62,
      all the poison ran about his chaw
Verb

chaw (chaws, present participle chawing; past and past participle chawed)

  1. (archaic or nonstandard) To chew; to grind with one's teeth; to masticate (food, or the cud)
    • c. 1540, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Translations from the Æneid, Book 4, in The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1920, p. 130,
      The trampling steede, with gold and purple trapt,
      Chawing the fomie bit, there fercely stood.
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto Four, stanza 30, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006, p. 62,
      And next to him malicious Envy rode,
      Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw
      Betweene his cankred teeth a venemous tode […]
    • 1682, John Dryden, The Medall. A Satyre against Sedition, lines 145-8,
      The Man who laugh'd but once, to see an Ass
      Mumbling to make the cross-grained Thistles pass,
      Might laugh again, to see a Jury chaw
      The prickles of unpalatable Law.
    • 1942, Emily Carr, The Book of Small, “The Orange Lily,”
      Anne passed the lily. Beyond was the bed of pinks—white, clove, cinnamon. […] Anne's scissors chawed the wiry stems almost as sapless as the everlastings.
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To ruminate (about) in thought; to ponder; to consider
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book II, Canto Four, stanza 29, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006, p. 62,
      "I home retourning, fraught with fowle despight,
      And chawing vengeaunce all the way I went,
      Soone as my loathed love appeard in sight,
      With wrathfull hand I slew her innocent;
  3. (UK, slang) To steal.
    Some pikey's chawed my bike.



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