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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

lively.

Full of life; energetic, vivacious.

6 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈlaɪv.li/General-American, Received-Pronunciation

  1. Full of life; energetic, vivacious.

  2. Bright, glowing, vivid; strong, vigorous.

  3. Endowed with or manifesting life; living.

    archaic

  4. Representing life; lifelike.

    archaic

  5. Airy; animated; spirited.

    archaic

  6. Fizzy; foamy; tending to produce a large head in the glass.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English lyvely, lifly, from Old English līflīċ (“living, lively, long-lived, necessary to life, vital”), from Proto-West Germanic *lībalīk (“living, lively”), equivalent to life + -ly. Cognate with Scots lively, lifely (“of or pertaining to life, vital, living, life-like”), Old High German līblīh (“living, animated”), German leiblich (“bodily, corporeal”). Doublet of lifely and lifelike.

noun/ˈlaɪv.li/General-American, Received-Pronunciation

  1. Term of address.

    informal
Where this word comes from

From Middle English lyvely, lifly, from Old English līflīċ (“living, lively, long-lived, necessary to life, vital”), from Proto-West Germanic *lībalīk (“living, lively”), equivalent to life + -ly. Cognate with Scots lively, lifely (“of or pertaining to life, vital, living, life-like”), Old High German līblīh (“living, animated”), German leiblich (“bodily, corporeal”). Doublet of lifely and lifelike.

adv/ˈlaɪv.li/General-American, Received-Pronunciation

  1. Vigorously.

  2. Vibrantly, vividly.

  3. In a lifelike manner.

    obsolete
Where this word comes from

From Middle English lyvely, lifly, from Old English līflīċe, equivalent to life + -ly.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.