clew

Other forms of clew

plural

clews·

past tense

clewed·

present participle

clewing·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about clew

What does clew mean?

clew means "a ball of yarn or cord or thread". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in clew?

clew has 1 syllable under the regular spelling rules, and is not divided further. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for clew?

Close synonyms include clue, cue, clue. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is clew a common word?

clew is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.