Eve

How to spell eve

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce eve

What does eve mean?

1. nounThe day or evening immediately before a notable event, festival, or holiday.

Eve in a sentence

• The family gathered on Christmas eve to wrap the last of the presents.

• On the eve of the merger, both teams worked late to finalise the paperwork.

Where does eve come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a shortened form of the older English noun 'even', which in Old English was 'aefen' and simply meant 'evening' or 'the close of day'. Over the medieval period 'even' wore down in speech, losing its final 'n', and by the 1200s the clipped form 'eve' was in use, especially when speakers were talking about the evening before a holy day or festival. Because church observances often began the night before, 'eve' came to mean the day or period immediately preceding any notable event, as in 'Christmas Eve' or 'on the eve of battle'. The same root survives in the everyday word 'evening' and in the more poetic 'eventide'. The spelling trap is the silent final 'e', which lengthens the vowel; the word looks tiny but is built from a much longer ancestor.

How the word is built

• eve (shortened form of 'even', the Old English word for evening)