stave

noun

1. One of a number of narrow strips of wood, or narrow iron plates, placed edge to edge to form the sides, covering, or lining of a vessel or structure; especially, one of the strips which form the sides of a cask, barrel, pail, etc.

   “For the Cherubims ſpread foorth their wings ouer the place of the Arke, and the Cherubims couered the Arke and the ſtaues thereof, aboue.”

2. One of the bars or rounds of a rack, rungs of a ladder, etc; one of the cylindrical bars of a lantern wheel
3. A metrical portion; a stanza; a staff.

   “Let us chaunt a passing stave / In honour of that hero brave.”

4. The set of five horizontal and parallel lines on and between which musical notes are written or pointed; the staff.
5. (rare)The initial consonant, consonant cluster, or vowel of a word which rhymes with another word with the same consonant or vowel in stave-rhyme.

   “Ley, in his work on the Metrical Forms of Hebrew Poetry, 1866, has taken too little notice of these frequently occurring alliteration staves; Lagarde communicated to me (8th Sept. 1846) his view of the stave-rhyme in the Book[…]”

   “[The] stave that binds the two halves of the line together the on-verse must be classified as D in spite of the f-stave . . stave-rhyme (OED s.v. Stave sb.)”

   “... consisting only of the two staves, folches . . . fehta. […] Line 63 contains the two-stave rhyme, aerist ... asckim; the suggested reduplicative rhyme [...] is technically doubtful according to the standards we have[…]”

   “This may seem sparse and incomplete, but is reminiscent of the Old Norse stave rhyme technique in which one avoided two alliterating staves in one dipod – which the poets of that time considered superfluous.”

6. A sign, symbol or sigil, including rune or rune-like characters, used in Icelandic magic.
7. A staff or walking stick.

verb

1. (transitive)To fit or furnish with staves or rundles.

   “vpon paine of death to bring it out and to ſtaue it”

2. (transitive, usually)To break in the staves of; to break a hole in; to burst.

   “to stave in a cask”

   “A great Sea constant runs here upon the Rocks, and before they got to Land their Boat was stav’d in Pieces […]”

   “And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”

   “Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don’t stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent within the year.”

   “A little to one side a cask was being staved for the troopers who had come with the Duke; and on all the noisy, moving scene and the flags that streamed from the roofs and windows, and the shifting crowd, poured the ruddy light of a great bon-feu that burned on the farther side of the way.”

3. (transitive)To push, or keep off, as with a staff.

   “The condition of a servant staves him off to a distance.”

4. (transitive, usually)To delay by force or craft; to drive away.

   “We ate grass in an attempt to stave off our hunger.”

   “Congress had authorized seeds to be granted to the farmers there to stave hunger, but President Cleveland vetoed the bill.”

5. (archaic, intransitive, rare)To burst in pieces by striking against something.

   “But Donald would not hear of that proposal at all, assuring the Prince that it was impossible for them to return to the land again, because the squall was against them, and that if they should steer for the rock the boat would undoubtedly stave to pieces and all of them behoved to be drowned, for there was no [fol. 284.] possibility of saving any one life amongst them upon such a dangerous rock, where the sea was dashing with the utmost violence.”

6. (dated, dialectal, intransitive)To walk or move rapidly.

   “He turned and blundered out of the house, stumbling over a chair and trying a wrong door on the way, and went staving down the street as if afraid to look behind him.”

7. To suffer, or cause to be lost by breaking the cask.

   “All the […]wine in the city hath been staved.”

8. To render impervious or solid by driving with a calking iron.

   “to stave lead, or the joints of pipes into which lead has been run”

name

1. A surname.