NODE / 0393attestedPresent-Day English

clew

PRONUNCIATION /kluː/

a ball of thread; a guiding clue; a nautical corner, loop, or line

DATE: before the 12th century–today
SENSE: thread and nautical
FAMILY: Indo-European / Germanic
CANONICAL KEY: node:1:clew:attested:sense:thread-and-nautical

The literal and nautical spellings survive beside the now-dominant figurative spelling clue.

ANCESTRAL EDGES

ROOT OF THIS ROOT

GO DEEPERinheritanceestablished

Middle English · c. 1300–1600s

clew

a ball of thread or yarn

SOUND: Middle English clew / clewe survives as Modern English clew with loss of inflection and stabilized spelling.
MEANING: The literal thread-ball sense survives; nautical senses develop from the corner or fastening of a sail and the guiding spelling clue diverges later.
CHRONOLOGY: The modern spelling overlaps chronologically with the historical evidence sense.
SCHOLAR: Merriam-Webster · American Heritage editors
CONFIDENCE: established

Clew — Definition, Word History, and First Known UsesupportsDefinitions; Did You Know?; Word History: Etymology

Documents the surviving literal and nautical senses and the Middle English to Old English line.

ORIGINAL ↗

American Heritage Dictionary: clewcontextHeadword clew; etymology

Independently publishes the Middle English and Old English ancestry.

ORIGINAL ↗

OPEN CANONICAL EDGE 364 ↗

DIRECT DESCENDANT EDGES

THE NEXT HISTORICAL STEP

No reviewed descendants currently reuse this node. Absence describes the graph, not the entire history of the form.

TRANSITIVE DESCENDANT CLOSURE

EVERY REVIEWED BRANCH FROM HERE

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.

UNIQUE DESCENDANT NODES: 0
REVIEWED EDGES: 0
DEEPEST PATH: 0
MODERN DOSSIERS REACHED: 0

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

ATTESTATIONS / FIRST KNOWN USE

SOURCE-REPORTEDlexicographic first useestablished

before the 12th century

Merriam-Webster lexicographic first-use record for clew

Source-reported horizon for the literal ball-of-thread sense; no underlying Old or Middle English object was directly inspected.

clew dossier · recorded as clew

WITNESS RECORD ↗Clew — Definition, Word History, and First Known Use ↗

EDITORIAL REUSE

WORD DOSSIERS USING THIS NODE

01clewclew · established