chews

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of chew.

   He chews gum constantly during long meetings.

   The machine chews through tough cardboard in seconds.

   Note

   The -s form carries every sense of the verb, including the figurative ones. Beyond eating, a dog or a machine chews through things such as cardboard, a cable or a fence. In informal speech a person chews over a problem, turning it around before deciding. In that pondering use the particle matters: she chews it over, with a pronoun object placed between verb and particle.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of chew.

   The store sells caramel chews by the pound near the register.

   She handed out soft licorice chews to the children after lunch.

   Note

   Only the countable uses of the noun have a plural. Chews are usually small sweets, such as caramel or taffy chews, or separate plugs of chewing tobacco, and occasionally individual bouts of chewing. The mass uses take no -s: chewing tobacco as a substance, a food's degree of chewiness, or the mangled state of something torn up by a machine. The same spelling also serves as the present-tense verb, as in he chews.

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