‘Clue’ or ‘Clew’?

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as you can imagine, and decided I would start reading one of my favorite detective series from the very start: the incomparable Ellery Queen. 

Ellery Queen was the author as well as the main character of more than 30 mystery novels. Set in New York City in the late 1920s and 1930s, Ellery helps his police inspector father, Richard Queen, solve difficult and complex murders. I've been reading Ellery Queen since my own father introduced me when I was 10 years old, although I haven't read them all, and I've certainly never read them all in order. So I started with the first novel, “The Roman Hat Mystery,” which was published in 1929.

Ellery Queen was actually a pseudonym created by Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, two cousins who created the amateur detective. And being writers in the 1920s and '30s, they used a lot of terms and spellings that we might not be familiar with today.

For example, nearly everyone smokes in a Queen novel, and in the first several novels, the term "cigarette," is spelled C-I-G-A-R-E-T, not C-I-G-A-R-E-T-T-E.

Ellery's father, Richard, preferred his tobacco in the form a snuff, made from finely ground and dried tobacco leaves which are inhaled through the nose.

While fewer people smoke or use snuff these days, it's interesting to see how they enjoyed their vices 90 and more years ago.

But let me give you a clue as to what really caught my eye in these stories: The spelling of the word “clue."

Normally, when we talk about those small hints that help guide a detective toward solving a case, we spell it C-L-U-E.

But for the first several novels, with one or two exceptions, the authors Dannay and Lee spell the word C-L-E-W.

In the first several Ellery Queen novels, the authors used 'clew' instead of 'clue.'

I had never seen this particular spelling of the word, having only been familiar with C-L-U-E in the past. And now every time I see it, I pronounce it in my head like another famous detective, Inspector Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers: CLEW.

Inspired by my favorite amateur detective, I began to do a little investigating of my own to see if I could find any — oh, what do you call it? — indications or hints about this linguistic mystery.

Where did we get the "clew" spelling?

According to Merriam-Webster.com, the C-L-E-W spelling has been around since before the 12th century, and originally meant a "ball of thread." That word came to us from the Old English word “cliewen,” before becoming C-L-E-W-E in Middle English....

Keep reading on Quick and Dirty Tips