Other forms: reaves
To reave is to carry off by force, in old use. Reave the cattle, reaving the coast, come reaving.
It survives in historical writing and in the noun reiver, the border raiders who took cattle between England and Scotland for centuries. Bereave is the same word with a prefix, and it means to be robbed of somebody by death.
1verbreaveTo carry off by force.
“The raiders came over the hills to reave cattle from the farms.”
reave is a plundering.
Old English reafian means to plunder, from a Germanic root. Bereave and robe are relatives, from the sense of taking spoils.
Proto-Indo-European
*Hrewp-
Proto-West Germanic
*raubōn
Old English
rēafian
Middle English
reven
English, today
reave
Built from
From Middle English reven, from Old English rēafian, from Proto-West Germanic raubōn. Germanic cognates include West Frisian rave, Old English rēaf (“spoils, booty”)), and Old English past participle rofen (“torn, broken”), Norwegian rjuva, German rauben, Danish røve, and Swedish röva. Outside of Germanic, related to Latin rumpō (“to break”), Lithuanian rùpti (“to roughen”), Sanskrit रोपयति (“to make suffer”)). See rob and reif.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA