Word.ws English Dictionary

reaving

reaving is the present participle and gerund of reave.

Meaning of reave

Verb (1)

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

  1. (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
  2. (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)

  1. (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

Noun

reaving (plural reavings)

  1. An act of pillage or plunder.
    • It was then as much the scene of continual spreaths, liftings, reavings, and herriments, as the Border country itself.1836, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, volume 3, page 426

Forms of reaving

Verb
alternative form (archaic)rieving
Noun
pluralreavings

Questions about reaving

What does reaving mean?
Reaving means an act of pillage or plunder.
What is reaving the present participle and gerund of?
Reaving is the present participle and gerund of reave.
What part of speech is reaving?
Reaving is a noun.
What is the plural of reaving?
The plural of reaving is reavings.

Words near reaving in the dictionary

  1. reaved
  2. reaver
  3. reavers
  4. reaves
  5. Reavill
  6. reaving
  7. reavings
  8. reavouch
  9. reavouched
  10. reavouches
  11. reavouching

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reaving (page history and authors); 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.

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