Carve

How to spell carve

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce carve

What does carve mean?

1. verbTo cut cooked meat into slices or pieces, usually for serving.
2. verbTo cut into a hard material such as wood or stone to form a shape or design.

Carve in a sentence

• He offered to carve the turkey at the head of the table.

• The sculptor used a chisel to carve a figure from the marble block.

• A sharp knife makes it far easier to carve the roast.

• Visitors like to carve their initials into the old oak gate.

Where does carve come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Carve comes straight from the Old English verb ceorfan, which meant simply 'to cut' and especially 'to cut with an edged tool'. It belongs to the older Germanic family of words for cutting and scratching, and is a distant relative of the Greek verb graphein, 'to write' or 'to scratch', since early writing was literally scratched into a surface. For centuries carve carried the broad sense of cutting into wood or stone to make shapes, which is why we still speak of carving a statue or carving initials into a tree. The narrower modern image of slicing cooked meat at the table developed later but kept the same core idea of cutting cleanly with a blade. Because the word is a plain native survival rather than a fancy borrowing, the spelling stays simple, with the slightly old fashioned -ve ending pronounced like the v in 'have'.

How the word is built

• carve (single root from Old English ceorfan: to cut)