waive

• wave (obsolete)

• enPR: wāv, IPA^(key): /weɪv/

  • Audio (Southern England)

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• Rhymes: -eɪv
• Homophone: wave

From Middle English weyven (“to avoid, renounce”), from Anglo-Norman weyver (“to abandon, allow to become a waif”), from Old French waif (“waif”), from gaiver (“to abandon”), ultimately of Scandinavian/North Germanic origin; see weyver.

waive (third-person singular simple present waives, present participle waiving, simple past and past participle waived)

1. (transitive, law) To relinquish (a right etc.); to give up claim to; to forgo.

   If you waive the right to be silent, anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.

   1. (particularly) To relinquish claim on a payment or fee which would otherwise be due.
2. (now rare) To put aside, avoid.
   • a. 1683, Isaac Barrow, Sermon LIX, “Of obedience to our spiritual guides and governors”:

     […] seeing in many such occasions of common life we advisedly do renounce or waive our own opinions, absolutely yielding to the direction of others

3. (obsolete) To outlaw (someone).
4. (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.

• waivable
• waiver

• waiver
• waif

From Middle English weyven (“to wave, waver”), from Old Norse veifa (“to wave, swing”) (Norwegian veiva), from Proto-Germanic *waibijaną.

waive (third-person singular simple present waives, present participle waiving, simple past and past participle waived)

1. (obsolete) To move from side to side; to sway.
2. (intransitive, obsolete) To stray, wander.

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

waive (plural waives)

1. (obsolete, law) A woman put out of the protection of the law; an outlawed woman.
2. (obsolete) A waif; a castaway.
   • 1624, John Donne, Deuotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Seuerall Steps in My Sicknes: […], London: Printed by A[ugustine] M[atthews] for Thomas Iones, →OCLC; republished as Geoffrey Keynes, edited by John Sparrow, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: […], Cambridge: At the University Press, 1923, →OCLC:

     […] 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?

• aview