gravest

1. 1
   adjective

   Superlative of grave.

   The general faced the gravest threat to the nation in decades.

   Her injuries were among the gravest the surgeons had ever treated.

   Note

   The inflected top of the scale, built as grave + -est, is most at home with the adjective's darker meaning: serious in the sense of formidable, as in the gravest danger, the gravest error, the gravest charge. Most grave says the same thing. Readers of older texts should know that the identical spelling is also an archaic verb form meaning 'thou carvest', so context decides which word is in play.

2. 2
   verbobsolete

   Second-person singular simple present indicative of grave.

   Note

   Here the -est ending belongs to thou, and the verb is the old grave that meant to carve or engrave, all of whose senses are now obsolete. Eliza Lynn Linton's Azeth, the Egyptian (1847) turns it toward a face: thou gravest a new wrinkle on thy brow, so worry does a chisel's work. Use it only beside thou, and only where deliberate archaism is the point.

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