reave

present singular third person reaves · participle present reaving · participle past reaved · past reaved · participle past reft · past reft · alternative archaic reive · alternative archaic rieve

1. archaicTo plunder, pillage, rob, pirate, or remove.

   And I for one am not convinced of the innocence of the model: it is as if we let a criminal make up the law as he or she ambles along, reaving right and left.

   1997, Lawrence R. Schehr, Rendering French Realism, →ISBN, page 18

2. archaicTo deprive (a person) of something through theft or violence.

   Few of the chroniclers of Nero’s reign have been accurate when relating the situation that obtained between the Emperor and his mother from the time when, reft of her German and Pannonian guards, she lived in a more or less solitary rage on one estate or another.

   1985, Anthony Burgess, Kingdom of the Wicked

present singular third person reaves · participle present reaving · participle past reft · past reft · alternative archaic reive · alternative archaic rieve

1. archaicTo split, tear, break apart.

   There was the same enforced composure on her face, that there had been when she was dressing; and the wreath upon her head encircled the same cold and steady brow. But it would have been better to have seen its leaves and flowers reft into fragments by her passionate hand, […]

   1846 October 1 – 1848 April 1, Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1848, →OCLC