Verb (vulgar).—1. To eat or chew noisily and roughly. To bite (see
quot., 1890). Once literary; now degenerate, and vulgarly applied;
specifically ‘to chew tobacco.’
1890. The Oont, Rudyard Kipling in Scots Observer, ... We socks him
with a stretcher-pole, and ’eads him off in front, And when we
saves his bloomin’ life, he chaws our bloomin’ arm.