Word.ws English Dictionary

carven

carven adjective: made by carving, especially when intricately or artistically done. Also the past participle of carve.

Adjective

carven (not comparable)

  1. Made by carving, especially when intricately or artistically done.
    • The beams that thro' the Oriel shine / Make prisms in every carven glass, / And beaker brimm'd with noble wine.1842, Alfred Tennyson, “The Day-Dream. The Sleeping Palace.”, in Poems. […], volume II, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 151
    • I can fancy myself there now, the sun and the sweetness of the orange blossom bewildering in their purity, the green parrotlings in a nest behind a carven god simmering away contentedly like half a dozen kettles until with an express train shriek a red and green parent whizzed past me bearing a...1903 April 11, F[lora] A[nnie] Steel, “The Beasts That Perish”, in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, volume 95, number 2,476, London, page 449, column 1

Also used as

carven is also the past participle of carve.

Origin of carven

From Middle English carven, a variant (with the vowel modified to match the present stem) of Middle English corven, y-corven (“carved”), from Old English corfen, ġecorfen (“cut, carved”), from Proto-West Germanic *korban, from Proto-Germanic *kurbanaz (“cut, carved”), past participle of *kerbaną (“to carve”). Equivalent to carve + -en (past participle ending).

Questions about carven

What does carven mean?
Carven means made by carving, especially when intricately or artistically done.
What part of speech is carven?
Carven is an adjective.

Words near carven in the dictionary

  1. carvel-planked
  2. carvelbuilt
  3. Carvell
  4. Carvells
  5. carvels
  6. carven
  7. carvene
  8. carveol
  9. carveols
  10. carveout
  11. carveouts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: carven (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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