Drew is the past tense of the verb “draw,” which has several related meanings:

When you drew a picture yesterday, you used pencils, crayons, or markers to create an image on paper. Artists throughout history have drawn portraits, landscapes, and diagrams to capture what they see or imagine. Leonardo da Vinci drew thousands of sketches studying everything from human anatomy to flying machines.

The word also means pulled or attracted. A magnet draws metal objects toward it. A talented street musician might say she drew a crowd of listeners. When a western movie shows a gunslinger who drew his pistol, he pulled it quickly from his holster. You might say an exciting mystery novel drew you in and kept you reading late into the night.

Drew can also mean reached a conclusion. If a detective drew the wrong conclusion from the evidence, she figured out an answer that turned out to be incorrect. When you draw a conclusion in science class, you look at your experiment results and decide what they mean.

The word appears in several useful phrases. A contest that ends with no winner is called a draw. When something draws to a close, it's ending. And if you draw the line at something, you've decided that's as far as you'll go.