American Heritage(R) Dictionaries Weekly Word History: Clue

Join the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionaries each week as they investigate the mysterious origins of our everyday language.

CLUE

Clue and clew were at one time simply two spellings of the same word meaning "ball," especially a ball of yarn or thread, an obsolescent sense of clew today. The meaning "guide to a solution" developed from the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Theseus, a great Athenian hero, was to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, a monster that was half-man and half-bull and lived in the Labyrinth, King Minos's maze on Crete. Finding the Minotaur was no problem, but discovering the way out of the Labyrinth would have been impossible if Ariadne, Minos's daughter, had not provided Theseus with a clew—or ball—of string. Theseus unwound the ball as he entered and wound it up as he returned, thus following a sure path out of the maze. Allusions to this "clew of thread" or a "clew to a maze" have been common from Chaucer's day to modern times and have appeared in contexts that referred to various kinds of difficulties. As a result, the figurative import of the word clew was lost by the seventeenth century, and all associations with a ball of twine were cut. In very recent times, especially since the advent of detective fiction, the spelling clue has primarily signified the meaning "guide to a solution."

These word histories, as well as many others, can be found in Word Histories and Mysteries (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition .

Every word has its own story.