Grave

How to spell grave

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grave

What does grave mean?

1. nounA hole dug in the ground for burying a dead body, or the place where someone is buried.
2. adjectiveSerious, solemn, or giving cause for great concern.
3. nounA downward-sloping accent mark placed over a vowel in some languages, as in the French word 'mère'.

Grave in a sentence

• noun

  The family visited the grave every spring to lay fresh flowers.

• adjective

  The doctor wore a grave expression as she read the test results.

• noun

  The French teacher reminded the class to add a grave accent over the first vowel.

• noun

  Workers dug the grave at the far end of the cemetery.

• adjective

  Missing the deadline could have grave consequences for the whole project.

• noun

  She could not find the key for the grave accent on the English keyboard.

Where does grave come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This single spelling actually carries two separate family histories. The burial sense descends from the Old English word græf, meaning a trench, ditch, or excavated burial place, which belongs to the same Germanic root as the verb 'to grave' (to dig or carve) seen today in 'engrave' and in the German graben, 'to dig'. The quite different adjective meaning 'serious' or 'solemn' arrived much later, in the sixteenth century, from the Latin gravis, meaning 'heavy' or 'weighty', reaching English through French. That Latin root for heaviness is also the ancestor of 'gravity', 'gravitate', and 'aggravate', and the idea of weighing on the mind is exactly how a heavy matter became a grave one. The two words simply collided into the same four letters over the centuries. Because the spelling is so short and regular, it is the rare meaning, not the letters, that usually trips writers up.

How the word is built

• grave (a single root word; the burial sense from Old English græf 'trench, grave', the serious sense from Latin gravis 'heavy')