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eve

noun
EEV/iːv/

Pluraleves

3 meanings of eve

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  1. 1
    nouncountable
    The day or night before a particular day or event, usually a holiday, as in Christmas Eve.

    Crowds packed the square on New Year's Eve to watch the fireworks at midnight.

    The groom barely slept on the eve of the wedding, going over his speech until dawn.

  2. 2
    nounfigurativelycountable
    The period just before something happens or is introduced, when it is close at hand.

    The researchers believed they stood on the eve of a breakthrough in battery design.

    Analysts say the auto industry is on the eve of a major shift to electric cars.

    Similarverge, brink, threshold, cusp

  3. 3
    nounarchaic
    Evening or night: the close of the day and the dark hours after it.

    Couples strolled along the harbor wall on a mild summer's eve.

    And has she tired of weeping / As she lies down at eve.
    1896, A[lfred] E[dward] Housman, A Shropshire Lad
    Note

    Here the word keeps its first meaning. It comes from Middle English even, which lost its final -n before 1200 because speakers took it for a grammatical ending; the holiday "night before" grew from this sense. Poets kept it, as in A. E. Housman's "lies down at eve" in A Shropshire Lad (1896), and prose still reaches for a summer's eve. In ordinary talk, evening is the word.

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Origin

From a variant of the Middle English noun even (from Old English ǣfen), which lost its final -n before 1200 because the -n was mistaken for a grammatical ending; the archaic or poetic even (“evening”) comes from the same source. In medieval Europe a day was counted from sunset to sunset, so the night before a holiday belonged to that holiday, hence its “eve”.