Waive

Pronunciation

• enPR: wāv, IPA: /weɪv/
• Rhymes: -eɪv
• Homophones: wave

Middle English weyven, from Anglo-Norman weyver ("to abandon, allow to become a waif"), from weyf ("waif").

Full definition of waive

Verb

1. (obsolete) To outlaw (someone).
2. (obsolete) To abandon, give up (someone or something).
• 1851, Alexander Mansfield Burrill, Law Dictionary and Glossary, but she might be waived, and held as abandoned.
3. (transitive, legal) To relinquish (a right etc.); to give up claim to; to forego.If you waive the right to be silent, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.
• c. 1390, w, The Canterbury Tales, Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk,
  And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk,
  And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal,
  Anon he weyveth milk and flessh and al ....
4. (now rare) To put aside, avoid.
• w, Of obedience to our spiritual guides and governors, We absolutely do renounce or waive our own opinions, absolutely yielding to the direction of others.

Derived terms

• waivable

Related terms

• waiver
• waif

Middle English weyven, from Old Norse veifa ("to wave, swing") (Norwegian veiva), from Proto-Germanic *waibijanÄ….

Verb

1. (obsolete) To move from side to side; to sway.
2. (intransitive, obsolete) To stray, wander.
• c. 1390, Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Merchant's Tale", Canterbury Tales:ye been so ful of sapience
  That yow ne liketh, for youre heighe prudence,
  To weyven fro the word of Salomon.

From Anglo-Norman waive, probably as the past participle of weyver, as Etymology 1, above.

Noun

1. (obsolete, legal) A woman put out of the protection of the law; an outlawed woman.
2. (obsolete) A waif; a castaway.

Variant forms.

Noun

1. Obsolete form of waif
• 1624, John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions:I know, O Lord, the ordinary discomfort that accompanies that phrase, that the house is visited, and that thy works, and thy tokens are upon the patient; but what a wretched, and disconsolate hermitage is that house, which is not visited by thee, and what a waive and stray is that man, that hath not thy marks upon him?