grave

Meanings

Noun

• An excavation in the earth as a place of burial
• Any place of interment; a tomb; a sepulcher.
• Death, destruction.
• Deceased people; the dead.
• A written accent used in French, Italian, and other languages. è is an e with a grave accent (`).
• A count, prefect, or person holding office.

Verb

• To dig.
• To carve or cut, as letters or figures, on some hard substance; to engrave.
• To carve out or give shape to, by cutting with a chisel; to sculpture.
• To impress deeply (on the mind); to fix indelibly.
• To entomb; to bury.
• To write or delineate on hard substances, by means of incised lines; to practice engraving.
• To clean, as a vessel's bottom, of barnacles, grass, etc., and pay it over with pitch — so called because graves or greaves was formerly used for this purpose.

Adjective

• Characterised by a dignified sense of seriousness; not cheerful.
• Low in pitch, tone etc.
• Serious, in a negative sense; important, formidable.
• Influential, important; authoritative.

Related

Similar words

• weightsome, sweer
• sage, demure, thoughtful, weighty

Origin

• From Middle English grave, grafe, from Old English græf, grafu, from Proto-Germanic *grabą, *grabō, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrebʰ-.
• Cognate with West Frisian grêf, Dutch graf, Low German Graf, Graff, German Grab, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian grav, Icelandic gröf. Related to groove.
• From Middle English graven, from Old English grafan, from Proto-Germanic *grabaną, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrebʰ-. Cognate with Dutch graven, German graben, Danish grave, Swedish gräva, Icelandic grafa.
• From Middle French grave, a learned borrowing from Latin gravis. Compare Old French greve. grief.