Word.ws English Dictionary

tave

tave verb: to sprawl with the arms and legs; kick or fidget with the feet.

Verb

tave (third-person singular simple present taves, present participle taving, simple past and past participle taved)

  1. (intransitive) To sprawl with the arms and legs; kick or fidget with the feet.
  2. (intransitive) To toss or tumble oneself about; act violently, rage, throw a fit.
  3. (intransitive) To struggle, toil, strive, labour.
  4. (intransitive) To trudge, walk heavily.
  5. (ambitransitive) To wrestle.
  6. (dialectal, intransitive) To hurry along; gad about.
  7. (dialectal, transitive) To distress, overtire.

Noun

tave (plural taves)

  1. (dialectal) A difficulty, struggle.
  2. (dialectal) A hurry, stir, commotion.

Forms of tave

Verb
third-person singular presenttaves
present participletaving
past participletaved
pasttaved
alternative formteave
Noun
pluraltaves

Origin of tave

From Middle English taven, from Old Norse *tafa, from Proto-Germanic *tabōną (“to grope, feel”). Cognate with Faroese tava (“to endeavour, exert oneself”), Norwegian Nynorsk tava (“to toil in vain”), German zabeln (“to move convulsively, sprawl, flounder”).

Questions about tave

What does tave mean?
Tave means to sprawl with the arms and legs; kick or fidget with the feet.
What part of speech is tave?
Tave can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of tave?
The past tense of tave is taved.

Words near tave in the dictionary

  1. Tavastian
  2. Tavastians
  3. Tavasts
  4. Tavasuh
  5. Tavda
  6. tave
  7. Tavenner
  8. Tavenners
  9. Tavera
  10. Taveras
  11. Taverases

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tave (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: “tave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.