stive
/staɪv/
stive noun: the floating dust in a flour mill caused by the operation of grinding. Also the obsolete form of stew.
Noun
stive
Verb (1)
stive (third-person singular simple present stives, present participle stiving, simple past and past participle stived)
- To stew; to be stifled or suffocated.
- Let your cucumbers be ſmall, freſh gathered, and free from ſpots; then make a pickle of ſalt and water, ſtrong enough to bear an egg; boil the pickle and ſkim it well, and then pour it upon your cucumbers, and ſtive them down for twenty four hours; […] .1796, Amelia Simmons, American Cookery, 1996 Bicentennial Facsimile Edition, page 64
Verb (2)
stive (third-person singular simple present stives, present participle stiving, simple past and past participle stived)
- Sometimes with up: to compress (something); to cram.
- His chamber being commonly ſtived vvith Friends or Suiters of one kind or other, vvhen he gave his legs, armes, and breſt to his ordinary ſervants to button and dreſſe him vvith little heed, […] then the Gentleman of his Robes throvving a cloak over his ſhoulders, he vvould make a ſtep into his...c. 1635 (date written), Henry Wotton, “Of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: Some Observations by Way of Parallel in the Time of Their Estates of Favour”, in...
- And here I mist stay, / In this stived up kitchen to work all day.1836, T. S. Davis, editor, Kitchen Poetry: Every Body’s Album, volume 1, page 172
Also used as
stive is also the obsolete form of stew.
Forms of stive
| third-person singular present | stives |
|---|---|
| present participle | stiving |
| past participle | stived |
| past | stived |
Origin of stive
Apparently from a Middle Dutch noun related to stuiven and cognate to German Staub (“dust”).
From Middle English stīven, alternative form of stūphen (“to steep (meat in a liquid)”), from Vulgar Latin *extuphāre, *extufāre, *extupāre, from ex- + Ancient Greek τύφω (túphō, “to smoke”). Compare Scots stove (“to stew”) (whence Irish stobh), Old French estuver (“to put into hot water”), and Dutch stoven (“to stew, simmer”).
Related to Italian stivàre, Portuguese estivar.
Words formed from stive
- stive-box
- stive-room
- stivy
Questions about stive
- What does stive mean?
- Stive means the floating dust in a flour mill caused by the operation of grinding.
- What part of speech is stive?
- Stive can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce stive?
- Stive is pronounced /staɪv/.
Words near stive in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: stive (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: “stive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.