grieves

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of grieve.

   He grieves quietly, rarely speaking of his loss to anyone.

   A nation grieves together when tragedy strikes its leaders.

   Note

   The sorrow can run in either direction, depending on the object. With a person as object, the verb means causing the pain: it grieves me to say so. With a loss as object, it means mourning: she grieves her brother. It also stands alone, as in he grieves. A workplace use is quite separate: a union grieves a dismissal when it files a formal grievance about it.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of grief. Archaic: the usual plural is griefs.

   Note

   Only the countable uses of grief take a plural: a cause or instance of sorrow, a trial, a particular hardship. The plural counts afflictions one by one rather than naming sorrow as a single mass, as in Thomas North's Plutarch's Lives (c. 1600). The same spelling also serves as the present-tense verb and the plural of the steward word, so the context decides which one is meant.

3. 3
   noun

   Plural of grieve.

   The laird trusted his grieves to settle disputes among the laborers.

   Several grieves oversaw the harvest across the lowland farms that fall.

   Note

   A Scottish word for the stewards who manage a farm or an estate on someone else's behalf. An older use, now obsolete, made a grieve the governor of a town or province, so the plural can also turn up in historical writing about officials of that kind. Neither meaning has anything to do with sorrow. The word only shares its spelling with the plural of grief.

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