Other forms: sewing, sewed, sews
To sew is to join cloth with a needle and thread. Sew a button on, sew up a hole, learn to sew.
The past tense is sewed and the past participle sewn, though sewed is also accepted for both. It rhymes with so, not with new — which is the commonest mistake with the word. Sew up means to finish something decisively: they had it sewn up by half-time. Note the homophone sow, meaning to plant seed, which sounds identical and is the reason spelling tests love this pair. And sewing machine, which is one word plus one word and never hyphenated.
1verbsewTo join cloth with a needle and thread.
“She sewed the whole hem by hand in an evening.”
synonyms: stitch
sew is a way of joining cloth.
Also accepted in games: stitch
Old English siwian goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to sew that also gives Latin suere and, through it, suture and couture. The needle-and-thread word is one of the oldest in the language, older than weaving vocabulary borrowed later.
Proto-Indo-European
*syewH- — to sew
Proto-Germanic
*siwjaną — to sew
Old English
siwian
Middle English
sewen
English, today
sew
Built from
From Middle English sewen, sowen, from Old English siwian, seowian, seowan (“to sew, mend, patch, knit together, link, unite”), from Proto-Germanic siwjaną (“to sew”), from Proto-Indo-European syewH- (“to sew”). Cognate with Scots sew, frr saie, sei, stq säie, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish sy, and, more distantly, Polish szyć, Russian шить, Latin suō, Sanskrit सीव्यति. Related to seam.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA