reave

/ɹiːv/

reave verb: to plunder, pillage, rob, pirate, or remove.

Verb (1)

reave (third-person singular simple present reaves, present participle reaving, simple past and past participle reaved or reft)

(archaic) To plunder, pillage, rob, pirate, or remove.
- And I for one am not convinced of the innocence of the model: it is as if we let a criminal make up the law as he or she ambles along, reaving right and left.1997, Lawrence R. Schehr, Rendering French Realism, →ISBN, page 18
(archaic) To deprive (a person) of something through theft or violence.
- Few of the chroniclers of Nero’s reign have been accurate when relating the situation that obtained between the Emperor and his mother from the time when, reft of her German and Pannonian guards, she lived in a more or less solitary rage on one estate or another.1985, Anthony Burgess, Kingdom of the Wicked

Verb (2)

reave (third-person singular simple present reaves, present participle reaving, simple past and past participle reft)

(archaic) To split, tear, break apart.
- There was the same enforced composure on her face, that there had been when she was dressing; and the wreath upon her head encircled the same cold and steady brow. But it would have been better to have seen its leaves and flowers reft into fragments by her passionate hand, […]1846 October 1 – 1848 April 1, Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1848, →OCLC

reave meaning in Arabic

reave in Arabic

to plunder, pillage, rob, pirate, or remove: نَهْب بِالْإِعْتِدَاء nahb bi-l-ʔiʕtidāʔ

Forms of reave

third-person singular present	reaves
present participle	reaving
past participle	reaved
past	reaved
past participle	reft
past	reft
alternative form (archaic)	reive
alternative form (archaic)	rieve

Origin of reave

From Middle English reven, from Old English rēafian, from Proto-West Germanic *raubōn. Germanic cognates include West Frisian rave, Old English rēaf (“spoils, booty”)), and Old English past participle rofen (“torn, broken”), Norwegian rjuva, German rauben, Danish røve, and Swedish röva. Outside of Germanic, related to Latin rumpō (“to break”), Lithuanian rùpti (“to roughen”), Sanskrit रोपयति (ropayati, “to make suffer”)). See rob and reif.

Alteration of rive by confusion with the above.

Words formed from reave

Words that rhyme with reave

45 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about reave

What does reave mean?: Reave means to plunder, pillage, rob, pirate, or remove.
What is reave in Arabic?: Reave in Arabic is نَهْب بِالْإِعْتِدَاء (nahb bi-l-ʔiʕtidāʔ). See Reave meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is reave?: Reave is a verb.
How do you pronounce reave?: Reave is pronounced /ɹiːv/.
What is the past tense of reave?: The past tense of reave is reaved.

Words near reave in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: reave (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-reave.wav.

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