carven
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.80 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Made by carving, especially when intricately or artistically done.
Example Sentences
- "The beams that thro' the Oriel shine / Make prisms in every carven glass, / And beaker brimm'd with noble wine."
- "I can fancy myself there now, the sun and the sweetness of the orange blossom bewildering in their purity, the green parrotlings in a nest behind a carven god simmering away contentedly like half a dozen kettles until with an express train shriek a red and green parent whizzed past me bearing a dinner for one, […]"
- "She was in love. Rapt, she studied every lineament of the pale and perfect face—the brow from which bronze-coloured hair rose in tiers of burnished ripples; the large steel-coloured eyes, with their carven lids; the carven nose, and the plastic lips. She noted how long and slim were his fingers, and how slender his wrists. She noted the glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front. The two large white pearls there seemed to her symbols of his nature. They were like two moons: cold, remote, radiant. Even when she gazed at the Duke’s face, she was aware of them in her vision."
- "The facades of the buildings fronting upon the avenue within the wall were richly carven […]"
- "The architecture was bewildering in its multiform complexity: great, sleepy-lidded faces of stone gazed down from the eight-sided towers; fantastic dragon-hybrids writhed entangled coils above portal and arch; many-armed and beast-headed gods thronged the paven ways, lining entire avenues in rank on rank of carven stone idols so innumerable as to suggest pantheons as populous as dynasties."
- "We both loved her now and for all time, she was stamped and carven on our hearts, and no other woman or interest could ever raze that splendid die."
Etymology
From Middle English carven, a variant (with the vowel modified to match the present stem) of Middle English corven, y-corven (“carved”), from Old English corfen, ġecorfen (“cut, carved”), from Proto-West Germanic *korban, from Proto-Germanic *kurbanaz (“cut, carved”), past participle of *kerbaną (“to carve”). Equivalent to carve + -en (past participle ending).