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grieve

verbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɡɹiːv//

To cause sorrow or distress to.

verb

  1. 1

    To cause sorrow or distress to.

    [object Object]

    Thy maidens griev'd themselves at my concern.

  2. 2

    To feel very sad about; to mourn; to sorrow for.

    to grieve one's fate

  3. 3

    To experience grief.

  4. 4

    archaicTo harm.

  5. 5

    To submit or file a grievance (about).

    Even if the executive director rules against the employee on appeal, the employee can still grieve the termination to the superintendent followed by an appeal to the … Board of Trustees.

Etymology

From Middle English greven, from Old French grever (“to burden”), from Latin gravō, gravāre, from adjective gravis (“grave”). For the meaning development compare Russian тяготи́ть (tjagotítʹ, “to be a burden (on), to oppress”), Russian тужи́ть (tužítʹ, “to experience grief”), related to тяжёлый (tjažólyj, “heavy, grave”), тя́жкий (tjážkij).

noun

  1. 1

    obsoleteA governor of a town or province.

  2. 2

    A manager or steward, e.g. of a farm.

    1559-1566, John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland [A prince] is nothing but a servant, overseer, or grieve, and not the head, which is a title belonging only to Christ.

    [T]heir children were horsewhipped by the grieve when found trespassing; […]

Etymology

From Middle English greve, greyve, grave, grafe, from Old Norse greifi, from Middle Low German grēve, grâve, related to Old English grœfa, groefa, variants of Old English ġerēfa (“steward, reeve”). More at reeve.

Forms

plural
grieves
past tense
grieved
past participle
grieved
present participle
grieving
third person singular
grieves
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).