An archaic or dialectal form meaning to chew or to work something in the mouth.
Variant spelling of 'chaw,' from Old English ceawan. This form appears in older texts and regional dialects where '-n' endings were more common in verb formations.
Many old spellings like 'chawn' show us that spelling wasn't standardized until very recently—early printers and scribes just wrote phonetically based on their own accent, so the same word might appear five different ways in one manuscript.
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