The doctor and the chemist

Near the end of the list is grave, and English owns that spelling twice over. The adjective in « a grave mistake » came through French from Latin gravis, heavy. The noun in « a grave in the churchyard » is Germanic, from Old English græf, a thing dug out, a relative of the « grave » inside « engrave » and of the German Grab. Nothing but sound brings the two together, and Italian has only the first of them. Grave is the weight word and nothing else, which is why the family around it is about load rather than burial: la gravità, aggravare, gravoso for anything that is a burden, and the accento grave that presses a vowel down. So the sentence a patient most wants to hear, per fortuna non è niente di grave, is saying that nothing here carries much weight — while the English ear, which cannot take in « grave » without a churchyard somewhere behind it, gets a chill the Italian does not contain. For the churchyard Italian reaches for another word entirely, la tomba.