Other forms: caves, caving, caved
A cave is a natural hole going deep into rock, dark inside and home to bats. Explore a cave, cave paintings, deep in the cave.
Most large ones are limestone, dissolved out over hundreds of thousands of years by slightly acidic water. The oldest known paintings are on cave walls and survived precisely because caves are dark and stable. Note cave in, meaning to collapse or to give way in an argument; and that the Latin means hollow.
1nouncaveA natural hole going deep into rock.
“The children explored a dark cave by the beach with torches.”
2verbcollapseTo collapse or give way, with in.
“After the heavy rain, the roof of the old barn caved in.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cave is a hollow in rock.
Old French cave comes from Latin cava, a hollow, from cavus. Cavity, excavate and cage come from the same hollow.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱewh₁-
Middle English
cave
English, today
cave
Built from
From Middle English cave. From Middle English cave, borrowed from Old French cave, from Latin cava (“cavity”), from cavus (“hollow”). Cognate with txb kor (“throat”), Albanian cup (“odd, uneven”), Ancient Greek κύαρ (“eye of needle, earhole”), xcl սոր (“hole”), Sanskrit शून्य (“empty, barren, zero”). Displaced native sċræf. More at cavum, cavus and cage.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA