Etymology: In form cive < French cive = Provençal ceba < Latin cēpa , caepa onion. The form chive probably represents a North French chive . (Compare rive < ripa ; cire < cera .) It is probable that sense 2 is originally the same word, though it never appears as cive , and early writers who regularly used cive for the plant, employed chive in sense 2.In Old English cipe , < Latin cēpa , still retained the sense ‘onion’ (also that of ‘shallot’ or ‘scallion’); but in Romanic the name was extended and transferred to smaller species of Allium. In French, cive included (or perhaps still includes) ‘several small species or varieties’, besides A. Schœnoprasum, to which the diminutive civette (in Catalan cebeta ) applies more exclusively. In English cive or chive appears always to have meant this, civet being merely a rare, and now obsolete synonym. In French it is also called ciboulette , diminutive of ciboule chibol n. Other Old French derivative forms were civol , civon , civot . The form chive is not recorded by Littré, but its existence in Old Northern French may be inferred from the derivatives chivon , chivot (Godefroy). In English cive and chive both occur from early times; but the former is the leading form, down to the 19th cent. The phonetic corruption siethe used by Tusser, and interesting as exemplifying the interchange of v and ð, is still in familiar use in the south of Scotland. The modern prevalence of chive in the leading form is, perhaps, due to association with chive n.², arising from the fact that it is for its slender leaves that the chive is cultivated. Chived garlic in sense Compounds clearly points to this.

Etymology: Occurs first in the expression ‘chives of saffron’, which in Berthelet's reprint (1535) of Trevisa's translation of Bartholomæus De Proprietatibus Rerum, takes the place of chithe , chire in the 15th cent. manuscripts, chire in the ed. of Wynkyn de Worde (1495). As chithe is apparently the original word, chive appears to be an altered form, perhaps partly phonetic (compare the form siethe in Tusser, cīthe in modern Scotch for cive = chive n.¹), partly influenced by confusion with chive n.¹, this being an Allium of which only the chithes or slender thread-like leaves are used. The passage in De Prop. Rerum is a quotation from Pliny H.N. xxi. 5. §11, ‘stantibus in medio crocis’, where ‘crocis’ has not the sense of ‘saffron’, but that of ‘internal organs of other flowers analogous to saffron’; but whether the English translator so understood it in rendering it ‘chiues of saffron’ is doubtful. In any case the sense of chive as thread-like organ in flowers is clear.