Hive
/haɪv/Definition, CEFR level B1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
nounA structure, whether artificial or natural, for housing a swarm of honeybees.
nounThe bees of one hive; a swarm of bees.
Sentence Examples
Bees communicate the location of food by carrying odor samples back to the hive.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
The bees are zooming out of the hive.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The worker bees returned to the ____ after collecting pollen.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The bees were busy moving in and out of the ____ to collect nectar.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English hyve, from Old English hȳf, from Proto-West Germanic *hūfi, from Proto-Indo-European *kuHp- (“water vessel”), from *kew- (“to bend, curve”). See also Dutch huif (“beehive”), Danish dialect huv (“ship’s hull”); also Latin cūpa (“tub, vat”), Ancient Greek κύπη (kúpē, “gap, hole”), κύπελλον (kúpellon, “beaker”), Sanskrit कूप (kū́pa, “cave”). Doublet of coupe, cup, and keeve. The computing term was chosen as an in-joke relating to bees; see this for more.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"First, for thy Bees a quiet Station find, / And lodge 'em under Covert of the Wind: / For Winds, when homeward they return, will drive / The loaded Carriers from their Ev'ning Hive."
— 1697, Virgil, “The Fourth Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, lines 10–13:
"When that the general is not like the hive, to whom the foragers shall all repair, what honey is expected?"
— c. 1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iii]:
"There the horde of Roman robbers mock at a barbarous adversary. / There the hive of Roman liars worship a gluttonous emperor-idiot."
— 1864, Alfred Tennyson, “[Experiments.] Boädicea”, in Enoch Arden, &c., London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC, stanza 3, page 170:
"Windows builds the registry from the five registry hives[…]"
— 2006, Jean Andrews, Fixing Windows XP, page 352:
"For devices built with hive-based registry implementation, the registry data are broken into three different hives — the boot hive, system hive, and user hive."
— 2011, Samuel Phung, Professional Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0:
Explore More B1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The worker bees returned to the ____ after collecting pollen.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The bees were busy moving in and out of the ____ to collect nectar.