Carver

How to spell carver

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce carver

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carver mean?

1. nounA person who shapes wood, stone, or other material by cutting, or who slices cooked meat at the table.
2. nounA long knife used for slicing cooked meat.
3. nounA dining chair with arms, traditionally placed at the head of the table.

Carver in a sentence

• The wood carver spent months shaping the oak panel.

• She sharpened the carver before bringing the turkey to the table.

• The dining set came with four side chairs and one carver for the head of the table.

• As host, he acted as carver and divided the roast among the guests.

• The matching carver and fork came in a velvet-lined box.

• He always sat in the carver at family dinners.

Where does carver come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English verb ceorfan, which meant simply 'to cut' and is the direct ancestor of the modern verb 'carve'. By adding the agent suffix -er, English formed a noun for the person who does the cutting, especially the skilled shaping of wood, stone, or roast meat. The underlying Germanic root is related to words in Dutch and German for cutting and notching, and it shares a distant family link with the Greek word graphein 'to write or scratch', since both ultimately trace to an old idea of scoring a surface. Over time the noun broadened beyond people to name the large knife used for slicing a joint of meat and, in British furniture terms, the armed chair set at the head of a dining table where the host once carved. The spelling is regular and phonetic, the only mild trap being the unstressed ending, which sounds like a plain schwa yet is reliably written -er rather than -or or -ar.

How the word is built

• carve (from Old English ceorfan: to cut)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)