Other forms: knaves
A knave is a dishonest man, in old use. A scheming knave, that knave, knaves and fools.
It is archaic outside quotation and card games, where the knave is the jack. The word's history is a lesson in how meanings sink: it started as the Old English for a boy, then a servant, then a dishonest one — the same slide that happened to villain, which began as a farm worker.
knave is a dishonest person.
Old English cnafa means a boy or servant. The sense of dishonesty developed in Middle English, as it did for villain.
Proto-West Germanic
*knabō
Old English
cnafa — child, boy, youth; servant
Middle English
knave
English, today
knave
From Middle English knave, knafe, from Old English cnafa (“child, boy, youth; servant”), from Proto-West Germanic knabō. Cognate to Dutch knaap and German Knabe.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA