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grave

Pronunciation: /ɡɹeɪv/

The English word “grave” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. An excavation in the earth as a place of burial.
  2. Any place of interment.
  3. Any place containing one or more corpses.
  4. Death, destruction.
  5. Deceased people; the dead.
  6. A grave accent, the diacritic mark `.
  7. A count, prefect, or person holding office.
  8. A kilogram.

verb

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

adjective

  1. Characterised by a dignified sense of seriousness.
  2. Low in pitch, tone etc.
  3. Serious, in a negative sense; important, formidable.
  4. Dull, produced in the middle or back of the mouth. (See Grave and acute on Wikipedia.Wikipedia )
  5. Influential, important; authoritative.

Etymology

From Middle English grave, grafe, from Old English græf, grafu (“cave, grave, trench”), from Proto-West Germanic *grab, from Proto-Germanic *grabą, *grabō (“grave, trench, ditch”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrebʰ- (“to dig, scratch, scrape”). Cognate with West Frisian grêf (“grave”), Dutch graf (“grave”), Low German Graf (“a grave”), Graff, German Grab (“grave”), Danish, Swedish and Norwegian…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.