Word.ws English Dictionary

belive

Syllables: be·live/bɪˈlaɪ̯v/

belive verb: to remain, stay.

Verb

belive (third-person singular simple present belives, present participle beliving, simple past belove, past participle beliven)

  1. (dialectal, intransitive, otherwise obsolete) To remain, stay.
    • … God helpe me so, the best is thus to done. “Rise, let us speake of lustie life in Troy That we have lad, and forth the time drive, And eke of time coming us rejoy, That bringen shall our blisse now to blive, …"1843 (original date: 1475), Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Tyrwhitt, The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer - Page 321
    • So there bleveth no more, but I that am servant to the spirit, may lie down and die. In which death I glorify myself, but I am greatly troubled in my mind, that my riches which I had ordained to God be wasted and spent in foul things.1900 (original date: 1483), Jacobus (de Voragine), William Caxton, Frederick Startridge Ellis, The golden legend, or, Lives of the saints

Adverb

belive (comparative more belive, superlative most belive)

  1. (obsolete outside Scotland) Quickly, forthwith.
    • By that same way the direfull dames doe driue / Their mournefull charet, fild with rusty blood, / And downe to Plutoes house are come biliue [...].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. (Scotland, dialectal) Soon, presently, before long; by and by; anon

Forms of belive

Verb
third-person singular presentbelives
present participlebeliving
pastbelove
past participlebeliven
alternative formbilive
alternative formblive
alternative formbleve
alternative formbileve
alternative formbilave
alternative formblewe
Adverb
comparativemore belive
superlativemost belive

Origin of belive

From Middle English beliven, from Old English belīfan (“to remain”), from Proto-West Germanic *bilīban, from Proto-Germanic *bilībaną (“to remain”), from Proto-Germanic *bi- + Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“to stick, glue”). Cognate with West Frisian bliuwe (“to stay”), Dutch blijven (“to remain”), German bleiben (“to remain”), Danish blive (“to be, remain”). More at leave.

From Middle English bilive (“actively, vigorously, eagerly, gladly, quickly, at once”), with syncopated alternative form blive. The adverb is from a contraction of by /bi + live (dative form of lyf, "life"), literally, "by life".

Words that rhyme with belive

34 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about belive

What does belive mean?
Belive means to remain, stay.
What part of speech is belive?
Belive can be a verb or an adverb.
How do you pronounce belive?
Belive is pronounced /bɪˈlaɪ̯v/.
What is the past tense of belive?
The past tense of belive is belove.

Words near belive in the dictionary

  1. belittling
  2. belittlingly
  3. belittlings
  4. Belitung
  5. belivable
  6. belive
  7. Beliveau
  8. Beliveaus
  9. beliven
  10. belives
  11. beliving

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: belive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “belive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/belive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.