Dive

How to spell dive

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dive

What does dive mean?

1. verbTo plunge headfirst or downward, especially into water or through the air.
2. nounA disreputable or run-down bar, club, or similar establishment.

Dive in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to dive from the highest board at the pool.

• noun

  The bar turned out to be a real dive with sticky floors and cheap beer.

• verb

  The swimmers dive in unison at the starting signal.

• noun

  They ended the night at a smoky dive near the train station.

Where does dive come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Dive comes straight from Old English, where two closely related verbs sat side by side: dūfan, meaning 'to sink' or 'to plunge', and dȳfan, meaning 'to dip' or 'to immerse'. Both descend from a common Germanic root that carried the idea of going down into water, and you can still hear its relatives in the modern words 'dip' and 'dove' (the bird, whose ducking, bobbing flight gave it the name). Over the centuries the two Old English verbs merged into the single word we use today, which is one reason English ended up with two competing past tenses, the regular 'dived' and the analogical 'dove'. The figurative sense of plunging downward, as an aircraft or a price does, grew naturally from the literal one. The shabby-bar meaning of 'dive' is a much later, nineteenth-century American slang sense, the idea being a low place you descend into, often below street level.

How the word is built

• dive (from Old English dūfan/dȳfan: to sink, to dip)
• no affixes; a single Germanic root