stave

Etymology

Back-formation from staves, the plural of staff.

noun

1. One of a number of narrow strips of wood, or narrow iron plates, placed edge to edge to form the sides, covering, or lining of a vessel or structure; especially, one of the strips which form the sides of a cask, barrel, pail, etc.
2. One of the bars or rounds of a rack, rungs of a ladder, etc; one of the cylindrical bars of a lantern wheel
3. (poetry) A metrical portion; a stanza; a staff.
   Let us chaunt a passing stave / In honour of that hero brave. 1815, William Wordsworth, Rob Roy's Grave
4. (music) The five horizontal and parallel lines on and between which musical notes are written or pointed; the staff.
5. (poetry, rare) The initial consonant, consonant cluster, or vowel of a word which rhymes with another word with the same consonant or vowel in stave-rhyme.
   Ley, in his work on the Metrical Forms of Hebrew Poetry, 1866, has taken too little notice of these frequently occurring alliteration staves; Lagarde communicated to me (8th Sept. 1846) his view of the stave-rhyme in the Book[…] 1874, Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon, page 73
   [The] stave that binds the two halves of the line together the on-verse must be classified as D in spite of the f-stave . . stave-rhyme (OED s.v. Stave sb.) 1974, John Collins Pope, Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, page 193
   ... consisting only of the two staves, folches . . . fehta. […] Line 63 contains the two-stave rhyme, aerist ... asckim; the suggested reduplicative rhyme … is technically doubtful according to the standards we have[…] 1975, Studies in Medieval Culture, page 11
   This may seem sparse and incomplete, but is reminiscent of the Old Norse stave rhyme technique in which one avoided two alliterating staves in one dipod – which the poets of that time considered superfluous. (please add an English translation of this quotation) 2005, Studia musicologica Norvegica
6. A sign, symbol or sigil, including rune or rune-like characters, used in Icelandic magic.
7. A staff or walking stick.

verb

1. (transitive) To fit or furnish with staves or rundles.
2. (transitive, usually with 'in') To break in the staves of; to break a hole in; to burst.
   to stave in a cask
   A great Sea constant runs here upon the Rocks, and before they got to Land their Boat was stav’d in Pieces […] 1743, Robert Drury, The Pleasant, and Surprizing Adventures of Mr. Robert Drury, during his Fifteen Years Captivity on the Island of Madagascar, London, page 12
3. (transitive, with 'off') To push, or keep off, as with a staff.
4. (transitive, usually with 'off') To delay by force or craft; to drive away.
   We ate grass in an attempt to stave off our hunger.
   Congress had authorized seeds to be granted to the farmers there to stave hunger, but President Cleveland vetoed the bill. 2009, Brent Stransky, The Young Conservative's Field Guide, page 39
5. (intransitive, rare or archaic) To burst in pieces by striking against something.
   But Donald would not hear of that proposal at all, assuring the Prince that it was impossible for them to return to the land again, because the squall was against them, and that if they should steer for the rock the boat would undoubtedly stave to pieces and all of them behoved to be drowned, for there was no [fol. 284.] possibility of saving any one life amongst them upon such a dangerous rock, where the sea was dashing with the utmost violence. 1746, Robert Forbes, The Lyon in Mourning, volume 1, page 164
6. (intransitive, old-fashioned or dialect) To walk or move rapidly.
   He turned and blundered out of the house, stumbling over a chair and trying a wrong door on the way, and went staving down the street as if afraid to look behind him. 1845, The Century Magazine, volume 48, page 41
7. To suffer, or cause to be lost by breaking the cask.
8. To render impervious or solid by driving with a calking iron.
   to stave lead, or the joints of pipes into which lead has been run