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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

dove.

A pigeon, especially one smaller in size and white-colored; a bird (often arbitrarily called either a pigeon or a dove or both) of more than three hundred species of the family Columbidae.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/dʌv//dʊv/Northern-England
  1. A pigeon, especially one smaller in size and white-colored; a bird (often arbitrarily called either a pigeon or a dove or both) of more than three hundred species of the family Columbidae.

    countable
  2. A person favouring conciliation and negotiation rather than conflict.

    countable
  3. A term of endearment for one regarded as pure and gentle.

    countable
  4. A greyish, bluish, pinkish colour like that of the bird.

    countable · uncountable
  5. Ellipsis of love dove (“a tablet of the drug ecstasy”).

    abbreviation · alt-of · countable · ellipsis · slang
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *dʰewbʰ-der.? Proto-Germanic *dūbaną? Proto-Germanic *dūbǭ Proto-West Germanic *dūbā Old English *dūfe Middle English douve English dove From Middle English douve, dove, duve, from Old English *dūfe (“dove, pigeon”), from Proto-West Germanic *dūbā, from Proto-Germanic *dūbǭ (“dove, pigeon”). Cognate with Scots doo, dow, Saterland Frisian Duuwe, West Frisian do, Dutch duif, Afrikaans duif, Sranan Tongo doifi, German Taube, German Low German Duuv, Dutch Low Saxon duve, doeve, Danish due, Faroese dúgva, Icelandic dúfa, Norwegian Bokmål due, Norwegian Nynorsk due, Swedish duva, Yiddish טויב (toyb), Gothic *𐌳𐌿𐌱𐍉 (*dubō).

verb/dəʊv/Received-Pronunciation/doʊv/US
  1. simple past of dive

    Canada · US · dialectal · form-of · past
  2. past participle of dive

    form-of · nonstandard · participle · past
Where this word comes from

A modern formation of the strong conjugation, by analogy with drive → drove and weave → wove.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.