Word.ws English Dictionary

rive

UK/ɹaɪv/

rive verb: to tear apart by force; to rend; to split; to cleave.

Verb (1)

rive (third-person singular simple present rives, present participle riving, simple past rived or rove or rave, past participle rived or rove or rave or riven)

  1. (transitive, archaic except in past participle) To tear apart by force; to rend; to split; to cleave.
    • I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds / Have rived the knotty oaks[…]1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Iulius Cæsar”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
    Synonyms:
    cleave, rend, split
  2. (archaic, transitive) To pierce or cleave with a weapon.
    • And therwith she toke the swerd from her loue that lay ded and fylle to the ground in a swowne / And whan she aroos she made grete dole out of mesure / the whiche sorowe greued Balyn passyngly sore / and he wente vnto her for to haue taken the swerd oute of her hād but[…]sodenly she sette the...1485, Sir Thomas Malory, “vj”, in Le Morte Darthur, book II
    • And the sword that had visited Earth from so far away smote like the falling of thunderbolts [...] and the runes in Alveric’s far-travelled sword exulted, and roared at the elf-knight; until in the dark of the wood, amongst branches severed from disenchanted trees, with a blow like that of a...1924, Lord Dunsany, chapter III, in The King of Elfland's Daughter, New York: G.P. Puttnam's Sons, page 30
  3. (intransitive) To break apart; to split.
    • The varlet at his plaint was grieu'd so sore, / That his deepe wounded hart in two did riue[…].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto VI”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • Freestone i.e. that rives, splits, and breaks in any direction.1728, John Woodward, An Attempt towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England
  4. (rare, transitive) To burst open; explode; discharge.
    • Ten thousand French have ta'en the sacrament, To rive their dangerous artillery1821, William Shakespeare, James Boswell, Richard Farmer, The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare
  5. To use a technique of splitting or sawing wood radially from a log (e.g. clapboards).

Noun (1)

rive (plural rives)

  1. A place torn; a rent; a rift.
    Synonyms:
    rent, rift

Noun (2)

rive (plural rives)

  1. A bank or shore.

Verb (2)

rive

  1. To land.

Proper noun capitalized: Rive

Rive (plural Rives)

  1. A surname from French.

rive meaning in Tamil, Urdu and Kannada

rive in Tamil

உற

rive in Urdu

چیرنا, پھاڑ ڈالنا

rive in Kannada

ಸೀಳು, ಸಿಗಿ, ಹರಿ

Examples of rive in a sentence

  • To the west, the country descends more gradually to the extensive plains of the Nile Valley but is riven by the rugged valleys of the Takezze and other Nile tributaries.2012, David W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation. Aksum & the northern Horn, 1000 BC–AD 1300, Woodbridge, Suffolk: James...
  • Oil-rich Libya has been riven by political infighting, corruption and external interference since a 2011 uprising that toppled and later led to the death of the longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi.2023 September 12, Patrick Wintour, “‘Disastrous beyond comprehension’: 10,000 missing after Libya floods”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Synonyms of rive

All synonyms of rive

Forms of rive

Verb
third-person singular presentrives
present participleriving
pastrived
pastrove
pastrave
past participlerived
past participlerove
past participlerave
past participleriven
Noun
pluralrives
Proper noun
pluralRives

Past tense of rive: rived or rove

Origin of rive

From Middle English riven (“to rive”), of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse rífa (“to rend, tear apart”), from Proto-Germanic *rīfaną (“to tear, scratch”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reyp- (“to crumble, tear”). Cognate with Danish rive (“to tear”), Old Frisian rīva (“to tear”), Old English ārǣfan (“to let loose, unwrap”), Old Norse ript (“breach of contract, rift”), Norwegian Bokmål rive (“to tear”), Swedish riva (”to tear”) and Albanian rrip (“belt, rope”). More at rift.

Compare Latin ripa (“shore”).

Borrowed from French Rive.

Words formed from rive

Words that rhyme with rive

34 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about rive

What does rive mean?
Rive means to tear apart by force; to rend; to split; to cleave.
What is rive in Tamil?
Rive in Tamil is உற. See Rive meaning in Tamil.
How do you use rive in a sentence?
To the west, the country descends more gradually to the extensive plains of the Nile Valley but is riven by the rugged valleys of the Takezze and other Nile tributaries.
What part of speech is rive?
Rive can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce rive?
Rive is pronounced /ɹaɪv/ (UK).
What is the past tense of rive?
The past tense of rive is rived.

Words near rive in the dictionary

  1. rivariums
  2. rivaroxaban
  3. Rivas
  4. rivastigmine
  5. rivayat
  6. rive
  7. rived
  8. rivel
  9. Rivelin
  10. riveling
  11. rivelings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rive (page history and authors); Rive (page history and authors); rive (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); rive (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); rive (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-rive.ogg.

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