Grove

How to spell grove

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grove

What does grove mean?

1. nounA small group or cluster of trees, especially one of cultivated fruit or nut trees.

Grove in a sentence

• The farmhouse sat at the edge of an olive grove.

• We picnicked in the shade of a quiet grove behind the orchard.

Where does grove come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Grove descends from the Old English word graf, meaning a small wood, copse, or thicket of trees, and it has been part of English since before the Norman Conquest. Its exact relatives in other Germanic languages are surprisingly thin, which has led some scholars to suspect it was a distinctly English coinage rather than a widely shared Germanic term. Over the centuries the spelling settled with a silent final 'e', and the vowel lengthened to the long 'o' we hear today, while the meaning narrowed toward a deliberately planted or cultivated stand of trees, especially fruit or nut trees. That sense survives in everyday phrases like 'olive grove' and 'orange grove', and it is preserved in countless English place names and street names. The single 'o' and single 'v' are the small spelling point worth noting, since the unrelated word 'groove' doubles both the 'o' and adds an extra letter for a quite different meaning.

How the word is built

• grove (from Old English graf: a copse or small wood; a single, unanalysable root word)