screeve

• IPA^(key): /skɹiːv/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːv

In view of the slang nature of the term, probably from Polari screeve (“write”), from Irish scríobh, eventually from Latin scrībō (“write”). Doublet of shrive.

screeve (third-person singular simple present screeves, present participle screeving, simple past and past participle screeved)

1. (obsolete, UK, slang) To write.
2. (obsolete, UK, slang) To draw with chalks on a pavement or sidewalk.
3. (obsolete, UK, slang) To write begging letters.

screeve (plural screeves)

1. (obsolete, UK, slang) A begging letter.

• “Screeve” in [John Camden Hotten], The Slang Dictionary […], 5th edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 1874, page 280.

English Wikipedia has an article on:

screeve

Wikipedia

Borrowed from Georgian მწკრივი (mc̣ḳrivi, “row, series”).

screeve (countable and uncountable, plural screeves)

2. (linguistics) In the grammar of Georgian and related languages, a combination of tense, aspect and mood. Occasionally used for non-Kartvelian languages.
   • 1985, Alice C. Harris, Diachronic Syntax: The Kartvelian Case, →ISBN, page 95:

     It has already been explained that the series in the Kartvelian languages are sets of tense–mood–aspect paradigms. These paradigms are traditionally referred to as screeves. In general, a screeve expresses one tense, one aspect, and one mood. For example, in Old Georgian the screeve that is called "aorist" expresses past time, indicative mood, and punctual aspect.

   • 1986, Chato Gudjedjiani, Mykolas L. Palmaitis, Upper Svan: Grammar and Texts, page 65:

     This qualitative vowel gradation is not connected with screeve (unlike Georgian).

   • 1990 [1982], Howard I. Aronson, Georgian: A Reading Grammar, Corrected edition, →ISBN, page 41:

     A final term must be introduced here, the screeve (coined by the Georgian linguist Aḳaḳi Šanije from the Georgian word mc̣ḳrivi 'row'). A screeve is what is traditionally called a tense, i.e., a set of six forms of a given verb differing only in person and number, as in Latin amo, amas, amat, amamaus, amatis, amant. But since the various "tenses" do not always have temporal meaning, but may have modal or aspectual meanings instead, we prefer the more unusual but less misleading term of screeve.

   • 1997, Stanford Carmack, “Blocking in Georgian Verb Morphology”, in Language, volume 73, number 2, page 316:

     The shape of the two 3(pl) subject markers (-s and -en) varies depending on the screeve (screeve is a term coined by the Georgian grammarian Šanije; it refers to a set of paradigmatic verb forms, embracing temporal, modal, and/or aspectual distinctions—see Aronson 1990:41).

   • 1997, R. L. Trask, A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, →ISBN, page 94:

     screeve A set of verb-forms in a language which differ in person and number but which are identical in tense, aspect, mood, and voice. An example is the present imperfect indicative active of Latin amāre 'love': amō 'I love', amās 'you love' (singular), amat 's/he loves', amāmus 'we love', amātis 'you love' (plural), amant 'they love'. Traditional grammarians often refer to such a set as a "tense", but this is a misuse of the term 'tense'.

   • 2007, Gregory D. S. Anderson, “Burushaski Morphology”, in Alan S. Kaye, editor, Morphologies of Asia and Africa, volume 2, page 1247 n.5:

     The term screeve—borrowed from the Georgian linguistic tradition (cf. Aronson 1982)—is used to describe sets of related tense–aspect sets. As Brsk. indicative finite verb forms seem to fall into two basic sets of forms, the term seems appropriate in this context.

   • 2015, Xavier Bach, Louise Esher, “Morphological evidence for the paradigmatic status of infinitives in French and Occitan”, in Dag T. T. Haug, editor, Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected Papers from the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oslo, 5–9 August 2013, page 138 & n.3:

     In general the velar is initially present in the preterite and imperfect subjunctive, but can extend to other screeves. [...] We use the term screeve to designate a set of verb forms the feature values of which only vary for person and number. Unlike the commoner term 'tense', 'screeve' refers only to the set of forms without any implication about their semantic (e.g. TAM) values.

   • 2026, Andrew Hardie, Sophiko Daraselia, “A theory for words in Georgian: traditional constructs versus corpus annotation”, in Corpus Linguistics and Ling. Theory, volume 22, number 1, page 132:

     Only agreement and screeve are predictable, productive, and paradigmatic: a finite verb expresses exactly one screeve and one agreement pattern. [...] Thus, we model verbs as classifiable by screeve and agreement alone.