Word.ws English Dictionary

alew

alew noun: a cry of despair.

Noun

alew (plural alews)

  1. (obsolete, rare) A cry of despair.
    • Yet did she not lament with loude alew, / As women wont, but with deepe sighes and singults few.1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto VI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Forms of alew

pluralalews

Origin of alew

Imitative. Compare halloo.

Questions about alew

What does alew mean?
Alew means a cry of despair.
What part of speech is alew?
Alew is a noun.
What is the plural of alew?
The plural of alew is alews.

Words near alew in the dictionary

  1. alevin
  2. alevins
  3. Alevism
  4. Alevite
  5. Alevites
  6. alew
  7. alewhap
  8. alewhaps
  9. alewife
  10. Alewine
  11. alewives

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: alew (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “alew.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/alew. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.