Other forms: braves, bravest, braved, braver, braving
Brave means doing the frightening thing anyway. The fear is still there — that is the whole point. A child walking alone into a new classroom, someone speaking up in a meeting where nobody else will, a person telling the truth when a lie would be easier.
Brave is also a verb: you brave the cold, brave the traffic, brave the queue that goes round the corner. Put on a brave face means hiding how upset you are. Careful with the line between brave and reckless — a brave decision weighs the risk and takes it, a reckless one never looks. British speakers also use brave gently about someone who is seriously ill. The family runs bravery, bravely, and its opposite is cowardly.
1adjectivebraveReady to face danger, pain or fear rather than avoid it.
“It was a brave thing to say in front of that crowd.”
2verbunpleasantTo face something unpleasant in order to get something done.
“They brave the cold every morning to swim in the sea.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: courageous
Brave arrived from Italy by way of France. English took it from Middle French brave, which had borrowed Italian bravo — a word whose own beginnings are uncertain. That makes brave a doublet of bravo, the word still shouted at the end of an opera.
Italian
bravo
Middle French
brave
English, today
brave
From Middle French brave, borrowed from Italian bravo, itself of uncertain origin (see there). a doublet of bravo.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA