clew
a ball of thread or yarn
- SOUND
- The spelling clue became standard for the figurative sense while clew remained literal.
- MEANING
- A guiding thread became a fact that guides reasoning.
- SCHOLAR
- OED editors
- CONFIDENCE
- established
CANONICAL LANGUAGE GRAPH
TRACE A WORD ↗a fact that guides a solution
ANCESTRAL EDGES
a ball of thread or yarn
DIRECT DESCENDANT EDGES
No reviewed descendants currently reuse this node. Absence describes the graph, not the entire history of the form.
TRANSITIVE DESCENDANT CLOSURE
This is the complete downstream closure currently supported by the canonical graph. Every displayed step is a real reviewed edge with its own sound claim, meaning claim, scholar, confidence, and citations.
No downstream edge has cleared review for this node. This is a graph-coverage statement, not a claim that the historical form produced nothing.
“Every” means every descendant in the reviewed SET-U graph. It does not convert missing scholarship or missing ingestion into a claim of historical completeness. The coverage ledger remains the honest denominator.
RECORDED EVIDENCE
The date and form are source-reported. No manuscript or inscription facsimile has been directly inspected for this record.
clue dossier · recorded as clueEDITORIAL REUSE