Word of the Day

: December 16, 2023

delve

verb DELV

What It Means

To delve is to carefully search for information about something, or to examine a subject in detail, as in “The class eagerly delved into the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.” Delve can also mean “to dig or labor with or as if with a spade,” as in “delving into their pockets for loose change.” As the examples show, delve is typically followed by into.

// Before my trip to Venice, I delved into the history of the city.

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delve in Context

“According to [Dr. Elena] Davidiak, this is not your typical language course. Students will delve into the disciplines of linguistics and fictional languages while analyzing and interpreting sentences from conlangs, artificially constructed languages, during class.” — Clare Gehlich, The Statesman (Stony Brook University), 27 Oct. 2023

Did You Know?

We must dig deep into the English language’s past to find the origins of delve. The verb traces to the early Old English word delfan meaning “to dig.” For centuries, there was only delving—no digging—because dig didn’t exist until much later; it appears in early Middle English. Given dig and delve’s overlapping meanings today, is the phrase “dig and delve” (as in the line “eleven, twelve, dig and delve,” from the nursery rhyme that begins “one, two, buckle my shoe”) redundant? Not necessarily. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in some local uses, dig was the term for working with a mattock (a tool similar to an adze or a pick), while delve was reserved for work done using a spade. Although delve has a history of use for literal digging, nowadays the term is often applied to carefully researching or examining something, as in “delving into the past.”