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Digging Up the History of Delve
We must dig deep into the English language’s past to find the origins of delve. The verb traces to the early Old English word delfan meaning “to dig.” For centuries, there was only delving—no digging—because dig didn’t exist until much later; it appears in early Middle English. Given dig and delve’s overlapping meanings today, is the phrase “dig and delve” (as in the line “eleven, twelve, dig and delve,” from the nursery rhyme that begins “one, two, buckle my shoe”) redundant? Not necessarily. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in some local uses, dig was the term for working with a mattock (a tool similar to an adze or a pick), while delve was reserved for work done using a spade. Although delve has a history of use for literal digging, nowadays the term is often applied to carefully researching or examining something, as in “delving into the past.”
Examples of delve in a Sentence
Kit Bernardi, USA Today, 31 Oct. 2025
Pritam delved into women’s trauma long before academics and historians on Partition—Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das, and Urvashi Butalia—started to examine it in the 1990s.
—JSTOR Daily, 30 Oct. 2025
The film delves into the then-trendy topic of the occult, adapting Ira Levin’s best-selling novel about a pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) in a stylish Manhattan apartment building who slowly realizes that her husband (John Cassavetes) is in league with the Satanists downstairs.
—Katie Rife, Entertainment Weekly, 30 Oct. 2025
In Heart Life Music, Chesney delves into his life and career, featuring everything from stories about Buffett to a behind-the-scenes look at how some of his greatest hits came to be.
—Alex Ross, PEOPLE, 29 Oct. 2025
See All Example Sentences for delve
Cite this Entry
“Delve.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/delve. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.
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