• IPA: /hjuː/

hew (hews, present participle hewing; past hewed, past participle hewed)

1. (ambitransitive) To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
   • c. 1591, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, Act IV Scene vii:

     Hew them to pieces, hack their bones asunder […]

   • 1912: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, Chapter 6

     Among other things he found a sharp hunting knife, on the keen blade of which he immediately proceeded to cut his finger. Undaunted he continued his experiments, finding that he could hack and hew splinters of wood from the table and chairs with this new toy.

2. (transitive) To shape; to form.

   One of the most widely used typefaces in the world was hewn by the English printer and typographer John Baskerville.

   to hew out a sepulchre

   • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), imprinted at London: By Robert Barker, […], OCLC 964384981 ↗, Isaiah 51:1 ↗:

     Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn.

   • December 19, 1734', Alexander Pope, letter to Jonathan Swift

     rather polishing old works than hewing out new

3. (transitive, US) To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with to.
   • 1905, Albert Osborn, John Fletcher Hurst: A Biography,^{[http://books.google.com/books?id=I3UEAAAAYAAJ ]} Jennings & Graham, [http://books.google.com/books?id=I3UEAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA428&dq=hewed page 428]

     Few men measured up to his standard of righteousness; he hewed to the line.

   • 1998, Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines,^{[http://books.google.com/books?id=mhYfL6Dn5g8C ]} Collectors Press, Inc., ISBN 1-888054-12-3, page 103

     Inside the stories usually hewed to a consistent formula: no matter how outlandish and weird the circumstances, in the end everything had to have a natural, if not plausible, ending—frequently, though not always, involving a mad scientist.

   • 2008, Chester E. Finn, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik,^{[http://books.google.com/books?id=Kny99CXP0kQC ]} Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-12990-8, page 28

     Faculty members and students alike were buzzing with the fashionable nostrums that dominated U.S. education discourse in the late sixties, […] These hewed to the recommendations of the Plowden Report, […]

     King recovered the rights on the condition that he'd stop publicly disparaging Kubrick's version. "For a long time I hewed that line," he told CBS News in June. "And then Mr. Kubrick died. So now I figured, what the hell. I've gone back to saying mean things about it."

• French: tailler
• German: einhauen, bearbeiten, hauen
• Portuguese: desbastar
• Russian: руби́ть
• Spanish: cortar

• French: façonner, modeler
• Portuguese: moldar
• Russian: придава́ть
• Spanish: tallar, labrar

• French: se conformer, accommoder, assujettir
• Russian: приде́рживаться

hew

1. (obsolete) hue; colour
2. (obsolete) shape; form

   • He taught to imitate that Lady trew,

     Whose semblance she did carrie under feigned hew.

3. (obsolete) Destruction by cutting down.

   • Of whom he makes such havoc and such hew.

1. Surname