waive

• enPR: wāv, IPA^(key): /weɪv/
• Rhymes: -eɪv
• Homophone: wave

From Middle English weyven (“to avoid, renounce”), from Anglo-Norman weyver (“to abandon, allow to become a waif”), from waif (“waif”).

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 forego.

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

   • c. 1390, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Manciple’s Tale:

     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 […].

   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.
   • 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.

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.
   • John Donne

     […] 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?

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