Carved

How to spell carved

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce carved

What does carved mean?

1. verbCut a shape or design into a hard material, or cut slices from cooked meat, in the past.
2. adjectiveShaped or decorated by cutting into a hard material.

Carved in a sentence

• verb

  The sculptor carved the figure from a single block of marble.

• adjective

  The antique chest had a beautifully carved lid.

• verb

  He carved the roast turkey at the head of the table.

• adjective

  A carved stone lion guarded each side of the entrance.

Where does carved come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past form of 'carve', which descends directly from the Old English verb ceorfan, meaning simply 'to cut' or 'to cut into pieces'. That word belonged to a wider family of Germanic terms for cutting, and it shares a distant ancestry with the Greek graphein, 'to write or scratch', since both ultimately trace to an old root for scratching or engraving a surface. In its earliest English use ceorfan covered ordinary cutting of any kind, but over the centuries the sense narrowed toward shaping wood, stone, or meat with deliberate, skilled strokes. The spelling settled with a 'v' where the old 'f' had softened, and the past form took the regular -ed ending, giving 'carved'. A useful memory hook is that the word has always meant cutting cleanly into something, so the single 'r' and the 'v' both belong to that ancient cutting root.

How the word is built

• carv- (from Old English ceorfan: to cut)
• -ed (past tense/participle suffix)