The tendon that connects muscles to bone is also called sinew. The noun is also used to suggest strength and resilience, and is sometimes used as a literary term for muscle, literal or metaphorical, as in “a nation’s sinew.”
Sinew derives from before 900 A.D., with relatives found in the Dutch zenuw and the Old High German senawa, indicating a Germanic origin, and our present spelling worked its way through the Old English seonowe to become the Middle English sinewe. Aside from its anatomical meaning, the word is often used to present an image of strength and power, evident in filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s statement, “I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”
