grieve

Grieve is a verb meaning to experience deep sorrow or distress in response to loss, especially the death of a loved one or the loss of something valued. It can also mean to cause someone else to feel sorrow or to lament or mourn. The word can take intransitive uses (to grieve) and transitive uses (to grieve someone).

Etymology traces the sense of heaviness and burden. It derives from Old French grever and ultimately from Latin gravis, meaning heavy. Through this lineage, English developed the sense of burden or affliction that underpins the modern meanings of grieve, grief, and grieving.

Common forms include grieving (present participle), grieved (past tense and past participle), and grieves (third-person singular). The related noun grief denotes the state or condition of sorrow, while grieving describes the ongoing process or activity of mourning. Phrases such as grieve for or grieve over are typical in English, signaling the target of sorrow.

Grief is widely understood as a natural human response to loss. It can affect emotions, thinking, bodily sensations, and behavior, and it often follows cultural or personal patterns of mourning. Contemporary psychology treats grief as a process that varies in duration and intensity, with social support, rituals, and coping strategies increasingly regarded as important to adjustment. While stages of grief have been proposed in popular literature, researchers emphasize nonlinearity and individual variation across different bereavement experiences.

See also: mourning, bereavement, sorrow, lament, relief from distress.