lave
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "lave", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "lave" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "lave" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
lave is aEnglishverb. It means: To bathe or wash (someone or something). Pronounced /leɪv/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | lave |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| IPA | /leɪv/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #72,484 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for lave is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /leɪv/. Corpus data places it at rank #72,484 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for lave in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: The verb is derived from Middle English laven (“to bathe, wash; to bail or draw water, drain, exhaust; to dampen, wet; to pour; of water, etc.: to flow, stream”), and then partly: * from Old French laver (“to be washed; to wash”) (modern French laver (“to w… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is lave, spelled L-A-V-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1To bathe or wash (someone or something).
- 2Of a river or other water body: to flow along or past (a place or thing); to wash.
- 3Followed by into, on, or upon: to pour (water or some other liquid) with or as if with a ladle into or on someone or something; to lade, to ladle.
- 4To remove (something), as if by washing away with water.
- 5To surround or gently touch (someone or something), as if with water.
- 6Chiefly in sexual contexts: to lick (someone or something).
- 7Followed by out or up: to draw or scoop (water) out of something with a bucket, scoop, etc.; specifically, to bail (water) out of a boat.
- 8To bathe or wash.
- 9To surround as if with water.
- 10Chiefly in sexual contexts; followed by at: to lick.
Etymology
The verb is derived from Middle English laven (“to bathe, wash; to bail or draw water, drain, exhaust; to dampen, wet; to pour; of water, etc.: to flow, stream”), and then partly: * from Old French laver (“to be washed; to wash”) (modern French laver (“to wash (oneself)”)), from Latin lavāre, the present active infinitive of lavō (“to bathe, wash; to dampen, wet”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *lewh₃- (“to wash”); and * from Old English lafian (“to bathe; to make wet; to ladle out; to pour”), from Proto-West Germanic *labōn (“to refresh, revitalize; to strengthen”); further etymology uncertain, possibly from Latin lavō (see above) but this does not explain the change in meaning from “to wash; to wet” to “to refresh; to strengthen”. Perhaps Old English lafian is derived directly from the Latin word, and Proto-West Germanic *labōn and words in languages derived from it such as Dutch and German are coincidentally similar to the Old English word. The noun is derived from the verb.
Frequency rank: #72,484 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter L in our English index: