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American Dictionary of the English Language

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Grave


GRAVE, a final syllable, is a grove.

GRAVE, verb transitive preterit tense graved; participle passive graven or graved. [Gr. to write; originally all writing was graving; Eng. to scrape.]

1. To carve or cut letters or figures on stone or other hard substance, with a chisel or edged tool; to engrave. [The latter word is now more generally used.]

Thou shalt take two onyx-stones and grave on them the names of the children of Israel. Exodus 28:9.

2. To carve; to form or shape by cutting with a chisel; as, to grave an image.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Exodus 20:4.

3. To clean a ship's bottom by burning off filth, grass or other foreign matter, and paying it over with pitch.

4. To entomb. [Unusual.]

GRAVE, verb intransitive To carve; to write or delineate on hard substances; to practice engraving.

GRAVE, noun [Latin scrobs.]

1. The ditch, pit or excavated place in which a dead human body is deposited; a place for the corpse of a human being; a sepulcher.

2. A tomb.

3. Any place where the dead are reposited; a place of great slaughter or mortality. Flanders was formerly the grave of English armies. Russia proved to be the grave of the French army under Bonaparte. The tropical climates are the grave of American seamen and of British soldiers.

4. Graves, in the plural, sediment of tallow melted. [Not in use or local.]