Word Type
Grave can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
grave used as a noun:
- An accent used in French, Italian and other languages. è is an e with a grave accent.
- An excavation in the earth as a place of burial; also, any place of interment; a tomb; a sepulcher. Hence: death; destruction.
"He had lain in the grave four days. —John XI.,17."
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
grave used as an adjective:
- Of great weight; heavy; ponderous.
"His shield grave and great. —Chapman." - Of importance; momentous; weighty; influential; sedate; serious; said of character, relations, etc.; as, grave deportment, character, influence, etc.
"Most potent, grave, and reverend seigniors. —Shakespeare." - Not light or gay; solemn; sober; plain; as, a grave color; a grave face.
- Not acute or sharp; low; deep; -- said of sound; as, a grave note or key.
"The thicker the cord or string, the more grave is the note or tone. —Moore (Encyc. of Music)." - Slow and solemn in movement.
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
grave used as a verb:
- To dig. Chaucer.
"He hath graven and digged up a pit. —Ps. VII 16 (Book of Prayer)." - To carve or cut, as letters or figures, on some hard substance; to engrave.
"Thou shalt take two onyx stones, and grave on them the names of the children of Israel. —Ex. XXVIII.,9." - To carve out or give shape to, by cutting with a chisel; to sculpture; as, to grave an image.
"With gold men may the hearte grave. —Chaucer." - To impress deeply (on the mind); to fix indelibly.
"O! may they graven in thy heart remain. —Prior." - To entomb; to bury. —Chaucer.
"Lie full low, graved in the hollow ground. —Shakespeare." - To clean, as a vessel's bottom, of barnacles, grass, etc., and pay it over with pitch — so called because graves or greaves was formerly used for this purpose.
- To write or delineate on hard substances, by means of incised lines; to practice engraving.
Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is grave?
- Noun usage: He had lain in the grave four days. —John XI.,17.
- Adjective usage: His shield grave and great. —Chapman.
- Adjective usage: Most potent, grave, and reverend seigniors. —Shakespeare.
- Adjective usage: A grave and prudent law, full of moral equity. —Milton.
- Adjective usage: The thicker the cord or string, the more grave is the note or tone. —Moore (Encyc. of Music).
- Verb usage: He hath graven and digged up a pit. —Ps. VII 16 (Book of Prayer).
- Verb usage: Thou shalt take two onyx stones, and grave on them the names of the children of Israel. —Ex. XXVIII.,9.
- Verb usage: This be the verse you grave for me / “Here he lies where he longs to be” — Stevenson, Requiem
- Verb usage: With gold men may the hearte grave. —Chaucer.
- Verb usage: O! may they graven in thy heart remain. —Prior.
- Verb usage: Lie full low, graved in the hollow ground. —Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of grave are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of grave, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
