Other forms: shaved, shaving, shaves
To shave is to cut hair off close to the skin with a blade. Shave your face, a close shave, shave the beard.
Shaving with the grain is less close and less likely to cause ingrown hairs than shaving against it, which is the whole trade-off. A close shave means a narrow escape. To shave a figure means to reduce it slightly. Note that the Old English verb meant to scrape.
1verbshaveTo cut hair off close to the skin with a blade.
“He shaved off his beard and looked ten years younger.”
shave is a cutting.
Old English scafan means to scrape or shave, from a Germanic root. Shape and scab come from related scraping.
Proto-Indo-European
*skabʰ- — to cut, split, form, carve
Proto-Germanic
*skabaną — to scrape
Proto-West Germanic
*skaban
Old English
sċafan — to shave, scrape, shred, polish
Middle English
shaven
English, today
shave
Middle English shaven, schaven, from Old English sċafan (“to shave, scrape, shred, polish”), from Proto-West Germanic skaban, from Proto-Germanic skabaną (“to scrape”), from Proto-Indo-European skabʰ- (“to cut, split, form, carve”). Cognate with West Frisian skave, Dutch schaven, Low German schaven, German schaben, Danish skave, Norwegian Nynorsk skava, Swedish skava, Icelandic skafa, Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌱𐌰𐌽, all roughly “to scrape, chafe, shave, plane, remove the outer lay of”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA