Shave

How to spell shave

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shave

What does shave mean?

1. verbTo cut hair off the skin very close, or to pare a thin layer from a surface.
2. nounAn act of removing hair with a razor, or a narrow escape.

Shave in a sentence

• verb

  He likes to shave before an important meeting.

• noun

  He treated himself to a hot towel and a close shave at the barber.

• verb

  The joiner used a small blade to shave the door so it would close.

• noun

  Missing that car by inches was a very close shave.

Where does shave come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shave descends from the Old English verb sceafan, which meant 'to scrape, scratch, or pare away', and it belongs to the wider Germanic family that also gave Dutch schaven 'to plane wood' and German schaben 'to scrape'. The earliest sense had nothing especially to do with whiskers; it described scraping a surface smooth, which is why a carpenter's tool that pares thin curls off timber is still called a 'shave' or a 'spokeshave'. Over time the idea of paring a surface very close narrowed toward cutting hair level with the skin, the meaning that now dominates. The figurative 'close shave', a narrow escape, grew from the image of a blade passing perilously near the skin. The spelling kept the long 'a' sound, which the silent final 'e' marks, so the word looks and sounds straightforward to modern writers.

How the word is built

• shav- (from Old English sceafan: to scrape)
• -e