Origin Story
The original form of clue is the Middle English clew ("ball of thread"). In Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to slay the Minotaur trapped in the Labyrinth. Ariadne, daughter of the Cretan king, gave Theseus a ball of thread and told him to unwind it on his way in, kill the monster, and follow the thread back out. This "clew" took on the figurative sense of "a guide that leads one out of a maze," and in the 17th century the spelling shifted to clue, settling into its modern meaning of "a hint, a lead." The very same image lies behind the Korean expression for "finding a thread of a solution."
The motif of following a thread out of a maze is also the blueprint of the detective novel. When Sherlock Holmes chases down a clue, he is structurally doing exactly what Theseus did when he followed the clew.
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Oxford English Dictionaryclue: variant of clew "ball of thread," from the legend of Theseus using thread to navigate the Labyrinth
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Online Etymology Dictionaryclue (n.): 1620s, a spelling variant of clew in its "thread" sense, extended metaphorically to mean "anything that guides through a difficulty"
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Merriam-Webster Dictionaryalteration of clew; from the use of a ball of thread to guide a person out of a labyrinth
Word Evolution
Words from the Same Root
Memory Hook
clue is a variant of clew ("ball of thread"). Remember it as "unraveling a clue the way you unwind a thread."
""What led the hero out of the maze was not the sword but the thread — the answer always lies in the simplest of things.""
