Word.ws English Dictionary

forhew

forhew verb: to cut to pieces.

Verb

forhew (third-person singular simple present forhews, present participle forhewing, simple past forhewed, past participle forhewed or forhewn)

  1. (obsolete) To cut to pieces.
    • And Beaumayns sawe hym and made hym redy / & ther they mette[…]and put their sheldes afore them / & drewe their swerdes / and gaf many grete strokes that somtyme they hurtled to gyder that they felle grouelyng on the ground Thus they fought two houres and more that their sheldes & theyr hauberkes...1485, Sir Thomas Malory, “xij”, in Le Morte Darthur, book VII

Forms of forhew

third-person singular presentforhews
present participleforhewing
pastforhewed
past participleforhewed
past participleforhewn

Origin of forhew

From Old English forhēawan, corresponding to for- + hew.

Questions about forhew

What does forhew mean?
Forhew means to cut to pieces.
What part of speech is forhew?
Forhew is a verb.
What is the past tense of forhew?
The past tense of forhew is forhewed.

Words near forhew in the dictionary

  1. forhare
  2. forharing
  3. forheld
  4. forhele
  5. forheling
  6. forhew
  7. forhewing
  8. forhews
  9. forhill
  10. forhilled
  11. forhilling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: forhew (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.

Last updated:

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