graves

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of grave.

   Vandals damaged several graves in the cemetery overnight.

   The graves near the chapel dated back to the seventeenth century.

   Note

   Only the countable meanings of grave take a plural. Graves can be burial pits or places of interment, and graves can also be accent marks over letters. The broader uses stay uncountable and have no plural: the grave as death itself, or as the dead collectively. The spelling is shared with the old verb for carving, so only the sentence around it shows which word is meant.

2. 2
   verbobsolete

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of grave. The verb is now rare.

   Note

   A present-tense form of a verb that everyday English has let go. Every one of its meanings is obsolete, from digging and burying to cutting letters into stone and fixing something in the mind. A modern sentence wants engraves or carves instead. Graves in this role reads as deliberately old-fashioned, and it is easily mistaken for the plural for burial places.

3. 3
   nounplural

   Alternative form of greaves; the sediment left from melted tallow.

   The graves left from rendering the tallow were pressed into cakes for the dogs.

   Workers skimmed the graves from the surface of the boiling fat.

   Note

   A word from the rendering vat with no connection to burial, despite the spelling. It means the unmeltable residue left when fat is rendered, and it exists only in the plural. It takes a plural verb (the graves were skimmed off) and has no singular grave in this sense. Where the homograph might trip a reader, the spelling greaves is the clearer choice.

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