Cleve

name, noun

name, noun ·1 syllable ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A room; chamber. dialectal
  2. 2
    A cottage. dialectal
  3. 3
    A cliff or hillside. obsolete
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A small town on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, named after Cleve House in Devon, England.
  2. 2
    A local government area is this area of South Australia; in full, the District Council of Cleve.
  3. 3
    A surname.
  4. 4
    A male given name, found predominantly in the United States.

Etymology

From Middle English cleve, from Old English clēofa, clēafa (“that which is cloven, a cleft, chasm, cave, den, lair, cell, chamber, cellar, apartment”), from Proto-Germanic *klebô (“chamber, cell”), from Proto-Indo-European *glewbʰ- (“to cut, cleave, split, divide”). Cognate with Old Norse klefi (“a closet, sleeping closet, bedroom”) (whence Icelandic klefi (“cell, compartment”)). Related to cleave.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.