Other forms: weaving, woven, weaves, wove, weaved
To weave is to cross threads over and under each other until they hold together as cloth. A rug growing on a loom, a willow basket, the criss-cross you can see if you hold a shirt up to the light.
The second sense moves: you weave through a crowd, weave between parked cars, weave in and out of traffic, turning constantly to get past things. Stories are woven as well — a novelist weaves three lives into one plot, a speaker weaves a joke into an argument. As a noun, the weave is the pattern of the cloth, and a tight weave keeps the rain out. Now the trap: the past forms split by meaning. She wove a blanket and the blanket was woven, but the motorbike weaved through the traffic. Cloth takes wove and woven; movement takes weaved.
1verbbraidTo make cloth or baskets by crossing threads or strips over and under each other.
“She weaves scarves on a wooden loom in the back room.”
2verbweaveTo move along by turning from side to side to get past things.
“The cyclist weaved between the stationary cars.”
3verbcombineTo combine separate parts into one whole, especially a story.
“He weaves three family histories into a single novel.”
4nounpatternThe pattern in which threads are crossed in a piece of cloth.
“The jacket has a tight weave that keeps the wind out.”
Weave goes back in a straight line through Middle English weven and Old English wefan to Proto-Germanic webana and the Proto-Indo-European root webh-, "to weave, braid". It never changed job in all that time: Dutch weven, German weben and Swedish vava still mean exactly this. Five thousand years of pulling one thread over another.
Proto-Indo-European
*webʰ- — to weave, braid
Proto-Germanic
*webaną
Proto-West Germanic
*weban
Old English
wefan — to weave
Middle English
weven — to weave
English, today
weave
From Middle English weven (“to weave”), from Old English wefan (“to weave”), from Proto-West Germanic weban, from Proto-Germanic webaną, from Proto-Indo-European webʰ- (“to weave, braid”). 2 Cognate with frr weev, weew, weewe (“to weave”), stq weeuwe (“to weave”), Dutch weven (“to weave”), German weben (“to weave”), lb wiewen (“to weave”), Yiddish וועבן (“to weave”), Danish væve (“to weave”), Faroese veva (“to weave”), Icelandic vefa (“to weave”), Norwegian Bokmål veve (“to weave”), Norwegian Nynorsk veva, veve (“to weave”), Swedish väva (“to weave”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA