mews

• enPR: myo͞oz, IPA^(key): /mjuːz/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Homophone: muse
• Rhymes: -uːz

From Mewes, the name of the royal stables at Charing Cross, which is the plural of mew (“moulting (of falcons), falcon cage”).

mews (plural mews or mewses)

1. (British) An alley where there are stables; a narrow passage; a confined place.
   • 1855, Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, section XXIII:

     What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
     No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
     None out of it.

   • 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Vintage Classics, paperback edition, page 106

     It was healthy and magnificient because one room, above a mews, somewhere near the river, contained fifty excited, talkative, friendly people.

   • 1935, T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, Part II:

     It was here in the kitchen, in the passage
     In the mews in the harn in the byre in the market place […] .

   • 1945 September and October, “The Origin of the Euston Hotel”, in Railway Magazine, page 266:

     It was further proposed that a space of ground near these establishments should be appropriated to a mews for the convenience of persons requiring post horses, and for the standing of horses and carriages at livery.

2. (falconry) A place where birds of prey are housed.

• Douglas Harper (2001–2025) “mews”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.

mews

1. plural of mew

See mew.

mews

1. third-person singular simple present indicative of mew

• MWEs, smew, wems