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grave

/ɡɹeɪv/noun, adjective

grave is spelled G-R-A-V-E: 5 letters and one syllable. It appears 20 times per million words in written English, the 4,224th most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). As a noun, grave means “An excavation in the earth as a place of burial” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of grave is graves.

How many letters and syllables are in grave?

Letters5: G-R-A-V-E
Syllables1 (from its American pronunciation)
In writing20 times per million words; the 4,224th most frequent word form
Wrong spellings searchednone measured in search

Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How common is grave?

Grave appears 20 times per million words in written English, the 4,224th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How do you pronounce grave?

  • /ɡɹeɪv/
  • /ɡɹɑːv/

Grave has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-grave.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of grave

  • graves plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • graving participle, present
  • graved past, participle
  • graven participle, past
  • graver comparative
  • gravest superlative

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What does grave mean?

The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).

noun

  1. 1

    An excavation in the earth as a place of burial.

  2. 2

    Any place of interment.

  3. 3

    Any place containing one or more corpses.

  4. 4

    Death, destruction.

  5. 5

    Deceased people; the dead.

  6. 6

    A grave accent, the diacritic mark `.

  7. 7

    A count, prefect, or person holding office.

  8. 8

    obsoleteA kilogram.

adjective

  1. 1

    Characterised by a dignified sense of seriousness.

  2. 2

    Low in pitch, tone etc.

  3. 3

    Serious, in a negative sense; important, formidable.

  4. 4

    datedDull, produced in the middle or back of the mouth. (See Grave and acute on Wikipedia.Wikipedia )

  5. 5

    obsoleteInfluential, important; authoritative.

verb

  1. 1

    archaicTo dig.

  2. 2

    archaicTo carve or cut, as letters or figures, on some hard substance; to engrave.

    a. 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem" This be the verse you grave for me / "Here he lies where he longs to be"

  3. 3

    archaicTo carve out or give shape to, by cutting with a chisel; to sculpture.

    to grave an image

  4. 4

    archaicTo impress deeply (on the mind); to fix indelibly.

  5. 5

    archaicTo entomb; to bury.

  6. 6

    archaicTo write or delineate on hard substances, by means of incised lines; to practice engraving.

  7. 7

    obsoleteTo clean, as a vessel's bottom, of barnacles, grass, etc., and pay it over with pitch – so called because graves or greaves were formerly used for this purpose.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Grave in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchtombe (excavation for burial), graver (to carve letters or similar), tailler, sculpter (to carve to give a shape), grave (having a sense of seriousness)
GermanGrab (excavation for burial), gewichtig, gemessen, gravitätisch (having a sense of seriousness), dumpf, dunkel (low in pitch, tone)
Portuguesesepultura, cova, túmulo (excavation for burial)
Spanishsepultura, fosa (excavation for burial), grabar (to carve letters or similar), esculpir, tallar (to carve to give a shape), serio (having a sense of seriousness)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does grave come from?

From Middle English grave, grafe, from Old English græf, grafu (“cave, grave, trench”), from Proto-West Germanic *grab, from Proto-Germanic *grabą, *grabō (“grave, trench, ditch”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰrebʰ- (“to dig, scratch, scrape”). Cognate with West Frisian grêf (“grave”), Dutch graf (“grave”), Low German Graf (“a grave”), Graff, German Grab (“grave”), Danish, Swedish and Norwegian grav (“grave”), Icelandic gröf (“grave”). Related to groove.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What to look up after grave