Meaning & use
grieve
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Meanings
verbtransitive or intransitive
To feel deep sadness after a death or other serious loss, and to go through the emotional process of coming to terms with it.
Grammar: Can stand alone (she grieved) or take the loss as an object or follow for (grieve a friend, grieve for a friend).
Patterns
- grieve for someone
- grieve over something
- grieve someone
Maria grieved for months after her grandmother died.
It takes time to grieve properly, and nobody can hurry you.
The whole village grieved the loss of the old schoolteacher.
verbtransitiveformalliterary
To make someone feel sad or distressed; to cause pain to someone.
Grammar: Takes a person as the object, often with it as the subject: it grieves me to see this.
Patterns
- it grieves someone to do something
- grieve someone
It grieves me to see the old theater closed down.
His constant lateness grieved his mother more than he realized.
The news of the flood grieved everyone who had once lived there.
Word forms
| third person singular | grieves |
|---|---|
| past tense | grieved |
| past participle | grieved |
| -ing form | grieving |
Common combinations
- grieve for
- The family still grieves for their lost son.
- grieve over
- There is no point grieving over a mistake you cannot undo.
- grieve deeply
- He grieved deeply when the old dog died.
- grieve openly
- Fans grieved openly outside the singer's home.
- grieve a loss
- She needed quiet time to grieve the loss of her job.
Synonyms and how they differ
- mourn
- Mourn stresses the outward expression of sorrow for a death, including rituals and public customs, while grieve focuses on the inner feeling.
- lament
- Lament suggests expressing sorrow aloud or in words, and it can apply to regrets about things that are not deaths.
- sorrow
- Sorrow as a verb is rarer and more literary, and it names the feeling without the sense of working through a loss.
- weep
- Weep describes the physical act of crying, whereas grieve covers the whole period of sadness whether or not tears are shed.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: grieve or grief? grieve or aggrieve?
grieve vs grief
Grief is the noun for the feeling; grieve is the verb for experiencing it. Say she felt grief or she grieved, not she grieved grief.
grieve vs aggrieve
Aggrieve means to treat someone unfairly so they feel wronged, which is different from mourning a loss.
Practice
After the fire, the neighbors gathered to ___ the family who had lost their home and everything in it.
Choose one answer.
Grieve for is the standard pattern for feeling sorrow about someone's loss. Grieve with of is not a real pattern, celebrate is the wrong meaning, and grievance is a noun.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “grieve”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.