O’er all the Efforts of her Mind presides,Īnd to the noblest End her Labours guides: With Wit, that’s clear and penetrating, join’d, Her Judgment sure, impartial, and refin’d, Then, the word clue, or clew, was used in many more or less figurative applications to denote a fact, circumstance or principle which, being taken hold of and followed up, leads through a maze, perplexity, difficulty, intricate investigation, etc.įor example, the English poet and clergyman John Pomfret (1667-1702) wrote, in the poem On the Marriage of the Earl of A- with the Countess of S- (1699): That, by a clewe of twyn, as he hath gon,įolwynge alwey the thred as he hath come.Īnd because that dwelling-place winds much in and out, and has such intricate paths ― for it is shaped like a maze ― and for this I have in mind a remedy, that by means of a ball of twine he may directly return the way he went, following the thread continually. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1342-1400) wrote about this myth in The Legend of Ariadne, from The Legend of Good Women (around 1385):Īnd for the hous is krynkeled to and fro,įor it is shapen as the mase is wrought ― She gave him a ball of thread, which he unravelled as he went in and used to trace his way out again after slaying the Minotaur. Theseus set himself the task of killing the Minotaur with the help of Ariadne, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë. (Pasiphaë was the wife of the king of Crete, Minos, hence the name Minotaur, the Greek ταῦρος (= tauros) meaning bull.) Confined in Crete in a labyrinth made by Daedalus, the Minotaur was fed with an annual tribute of seven virgins and seven young men from Athens. In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature who was half-man and half-bull, the offspring of Pasiphaë and a bull with which she fell in love. When these English words were in later times altered to -ue, this spelling was extended to various native words such as clue but also hue and rue.īoth the forms clew and clue were especially used to refer to the ball of thread employed as the means of ‘threading’ a way through a labyrinth or maze in various mythological or legendary narratives, the best-known being that of Theseus. In Middle English, -ew was the normal form even for words from French such as blew, now spelt blue (cf. These three Germanic words are cognate with the synonymous Latin noun glomus ( glomus is for glob-mus and is kindred with globus, the origin of English globe). Of Germanic origin, it is related to Dutch kluwen and German Knäuel, of same meaning. The word is from Old English cliwen, cleowen, meaning a ball formed by winding yarn, twine or thread (it is still one of the meanings of clew). The noun clue appeared as a variant spelling of clew, of same pronunciation. Not frequent until the 17 th century, clue has become the prevailing form of the word in the sense of a fact or idea that serves to reveal something or solve a problem.
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