Word.ws English Dictionary

graven

graven is the past participle of grave.

Meaning of grave

Verb

grave (third-person singular simple present graves, present participle graving, simple past graved, past participle graved or graven)

  1. (archaic, transitive) To dig.
    • He hath graven and digged up a pit.1526, [William Tyndale, transl.], The Newe Testamẽt […] (Tyndale Bible), [Worms, Germany: Peter Schöffer], →OCLC, vij:[16]
  2. (archaic, intransitive) To carve or cut, as letters or figures, on some hard substance; to engrave.
    • Thou shalt take two onyx stones, and grave on them the names of the children of Israel.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Exodus 28:9
  3. (archaic, transitive) To carve out or give shape to, by cutting with a chisel; to sculpture.
    • to grave an image
  4. (archaic, intransitive) To impress deeply (on the mind); to fix indelibly.
    • O! may they graven in thy heart remain.1718, Mat[thew] Prior, “Solomon on the Vanity of the World. A Poem in Three Books.”, in Poems on Several Occasions, London: […] Jacob Tonson […], and John Barber […], →OCLC, (please specify the page)
  5. (archaic, transitive) To entomb; to bury.
    • […]And lie full low, graved in the hollow ground.1595 December 9 (first known performance), William Shakespeare, “The Life and Death of King Richard the Second”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies: Published According to...
  6. (archaic, intransitive) To write or delineate on hard substances, by means of incised lines; to practice engraving.

See all 21 meanings of grave

Adjective

graven (not comparable)

  1. carved, engraved
    • Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Exodus 20:4

Verb (1)

graven (third-person singular simple present gravens, present participle gravening, simple past and past participle gravened)

  1. (archaic, transitive) To make graven or engraved
    • I saw I was not only gravened upon the palms of his hands, or set as a seal upon his arm, but I was pourtrayed upon his heart.1786, Thomas Doolittle, A treatise concerning the Lord's Supper

Verb (2)

graven (third-person singular simple present gravens, present participle gravening, simple past and past participle gravened)

  1. (ambitransitive) To make or become grave (serious or sombre)
    • Whatever it was that had cast a dark shadow and gravened the faces of those normally ebullient people was much too complicated for me to understand.2012, Samuel W Herbert, Avenue

Proper noun capitalized: Graven

Graven (plural Gravens)

  1. A surname.

Forms of graven

Verb
third-person singular presentgravens
present participlegravening
past participlegravened
pastgravened
Proper noun
pluralGravens

Origin of graven

From Middle English graven, igraven, from Old English grafen, ġegrafen, from Proto-Germanic *grabanaz, past participle of Proto-Germanic *grabaną (“to dig, trench”).

From graven (adjective) above.

From grave (adjective) + -en.

Words formed from graven

Phrases with graven

Words that rhyme with graven

Questions about graven

What does graven mean?
Graven means carved, engraved.
What is graven the past participle of?
Graven is the past participle of grave.
What part of speech is graven?
Graven can be an adjective, a verb or a proper noun.

Words near graven in the dictionary

  1. gravemaking
  2. gravemarker
  3. gravemarkers
  4. gravemound
  5. gravemounds
  6. graven
  7. graven image
  8. graven images
  9. gravened
  10. graveness
  11. Graveney

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: graven (page history and authors); Graven (page history and authors); grave (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.

Last updated:

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