Other forms: curved, curves, curving
A curve is a line that bends without any corners. The rim of a plate, the arc of a rainbow, the long sweep of railway track as it swings round the side of a hill.
The verb does the same work: the lane curves down to the river, the road curves left past the church. On a graph, the line drawn through the figures is a curve — a sales curve, a learning curve, a curve that climbs steeply and then flattens out. Bodies have curves, and clothes are cut to follow them. Ahead of the curve means further along than everyone else, and in American English a curveball is the pitch that swerves, so throwing someone a curveball is springing something difficult on them. The one thing a curve never has is a corner, and that is what separates it from an angle or a bend in a wire.
1nouncurveA line that bends smoothly, with no corners or angles.~37%
“He drew a long curve across the page.”
2nounrailA bend in a road, railway track or river.~2%
“The train slowed for the curve before the bridge.”
3noungraphA line on a graph showing how something changes.~59%
“The curve flattened out towards the end of the year.”
4verbsmoothTo bend in a smooth line.~2%
“The beach curves away to the north.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Curve arrived in the 1690s straight from Latin curvus, bent. Further back sits the Proto-Indo-European root meaning to bend or turn, which has thrown off a strange family: curb, shrink and even cancer are cousins of curve.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)ker- (turn)
Latin
curvus
English, today
curve
From Latin curvus. Attested since the 1690s, from Latin curvus (“bent, curved”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker- (“to bend, curve, turn”) + -wós. a doublet of curb and shrink and carcer and cancer.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA