Etymology

hive

H4I1V4E1

Today it means: A structure, whether artificial or natural, for housing a swarm of honeybees. Full definition →

Middle English hyve ← Old English hȳf ← Proto-West Germanic *hūfi
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European · derived from*kuHp-“water vessel”
  2. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*hūfi
  3. Old English · inherited fromhȳf
  4. Middle English · inherited fromhyve
  5. English todayhive

From Middle English hyve, from Old English hȳf, from Proto-West Germanic *hūfi, from Proto-Indo-European *kuHp- (“water vessel”), from *kew- (“to bend, curve”). See also Dutch huif (“beehive”), Danish dialect huv (“ship’s hull”); also Latin cūpa (“tub, vat”), Ancient Greek κύπη (kúpē, “gap, hole”), κύπελλον (kúpellon, “beaker”), Sanskrit कूप (kū́pa, “cave”). Doublet of coupe, cup, and keeve. The computing term was chosen as an in-joke relating to bees; see this for more.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.