Word.ws English Dictionary

cleve

cleve noun: a room; chamber.

Noun

cleve (plural cleves)

  1. (dialectal) A room; chamber.
  2. (dialectal) A cottage.
  3. (obsolete) A cliff or hillside.

Proper noun capitalized: Cleve

Cleve

  1. A small town on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, named after Cleve House in Devon, England.
  2. A local government area is this area of South Australia; in full, the District Council of Cleve.
  3. A surname.
  4. A male given name, found predominantly in the United States.

Forms of cleve

pluralcleves

Origin of cleve

From Middle English cleve, from Old English cleofa (“that which is cloven, a cleft, chasm, cave, den, lair, cell, chamber, cellar, apartment”), from Proto-Germanic *klebô (“chamber, cell”), from Proto-Indo-European *glewbʰ- (“to cut, cleave, split, divide”). Cognate with Old Norse klefi (“a closet, sleeping closet, bedroom”) (whence Icelandic klefi (“cell, compartment”)). Related to cleave.

Questions about cleve

What does cleve mean?
Cleve means a room; chamber.
What part of speech is cleve?
Cleve can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of cleve?
The plural of cleve is cleves.

Words near cleve in the dictionary

  1. cleuchs
  2. cleugh
  3. cleughs
  4. cleusonite
  5. cleusonites
  6. cleve
  7. Clevedon
  8. cleveite
  9. cleveites
  10. Cleveland
  11. Cleveland Bay

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cleve (page history and authors); Cleve (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: “cleve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cleve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.