Contextualizebeta

life

noun
/ˈlaɪ̯f/

Etymology

From Middle English lyf, from Old English līf, from Proto-West Germanic *līb, from Proto-Germanic *lībą (“life, body”), from *lībaną (“to remain, stay, be left”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“to stick, glue”). Cognate with Scots life, leif (“life”), Saterland Frisian Lieuw (“body”), West Frisian liif (“body”), Cimbrian laip (“body”), Dutch lijf (“body”) and leven (“life”), German Leib (“body; womb”) and Leben (“life”), Low German Lief (“body; life”), Luxembourgish Leif, Läif (“body”), Vilamovian łaowa (“life”), Yiddish לײַב (layb, “body”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish liv (“life; waist”), Faroese lív (“life”), Icelandic líf (“life”). Related to belive. The sense "biography" is likely a semantic loan from Medieval Latin vīta (“biography; hagiography”).

  1. derived from *leyp-✻ — “to stick, glue”
  2. inherited from *lībą✻ — “life, body”
  3. inherited from *līb✻
  4. inherited from līf
  5. inherited from lyf

Definitions

  1. The state of organisms preceding their death, characterized by biological processes such…

    The state of organisms preceding their death, characterized by biological processes such as metabolism and reproduction and distinguishing them from inanimate objects; the state of being alive and living.

    • I want my kids to live a good life.  He gave up on life.
    • My bloodleſſe bodie waxeth chill and colde, And with my blood my life ſlides through my wound, My ſoule begins to take her flight to hell, And ſummones all my ſences to depart: […]

  2. The animating principle or force that keeps an inorganic thing or concept metaphorically…

    The animating principle or force that keeps an inorganic thing or concept metaphorically alive (dynamic, relevant, etc) and makes it a "living document", "living constitution", etc.

    • The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

  3. Lifeforms, generally or collectively.

    • It's life, but not as we know it. She discovered plant life on the planet. The rover discovered signs of life on the alien world.
  4. ›+ 14 more definitions

    1. A living being

      A living being; the fact of a particular individual being alive. (Chiefly when indicating individuals were lost (died) or saved.)

      • Many lives were lost during the war. Her quick thinking saved many dogs' lives.
      • One of the hidden glories of Victorian engineering is proper drains. Isolating a city’s effluent and shipping it away in underground sewers has probably saved more lives than any medical procedure except vaccination.

    2. Existence.

      • Life is meaningless and we are all going to die.
      • Man's life on this planet has been marked by continual conflict.
      • the eternal life of the soul

    3. A period of time during which something has existence.

      • Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both.
      • "Life is pain," his mother said. "Anybody that says different is selling something."

    4. Animation

      Animation; spirit; vivacity.

      • No notion of life and fire in fancy and in words.
      • That gives thy gestures grace and life.

    5. A biography.

      • His life of the founder is finished, except for the title.
      • Writers of particular lives[…]are apt to be prejudiced in favour of their subject.

    6. Nature, reality, and the forms that exist in it.

      • The experts also agree that the bushmen only painted from life. This belief is borne out by the other Gorozamzi Hills cave paintings, which represent elephants, hippos, deer, and giraffe.

    7. An opportunity for existence.

      • The photo book represented my promise to her—a new life—and she desperately clung to that promise.

    8. The life insurance industry.

      • I work in life.

    9. A life assured under a life assurance policy (equivalent to the policy itself for a…

      A life assured under a life assurance policy (equivalent to the policy itself for a single life contract).

      • He renewed two lives which had dropped.

    10. To replace components whose operational lifetime has expired.

    11. Synonym of God's life (an oath).

    12. God.

      • Then one deep love doth supersede ⁠All other, when her ardent gaze ⁠Roves from the living brother’s face, And rests upon the Life indeed.

    13. Conway's Game of Life.

      • Maybe the RolfLife algorithm could be of value to someone implementing life i.e. in the vertex shader of a (DirectX 9) graphics card, where few lines of code and no LUT are favoured.

    14. A surname.

The neighborhood

Derived

10-20-Life, about that life, afterlife, after-life, A-life, A-lifer, all one's life is worth, all one's life's worth, all that one's life is worth, antilife, anti-life, anti-lifer, artificial life, art imitates life, as big as life, as if one's life depended on it, as if one's life depends on it, as large as life, author of life, bag for life, bane of one's life, bane of someone's life, battery life, beg for one's life, benevolent dictator for life, bet one's life, bigger than life, bigger-than-life, biological life, birdlife, bread of life, breathe back to life, breathe new life into, breath of life, bring back to life, bring to life, cat and dog life, celebration of life, change of life, charmed life · +422 more

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at life. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01life02inanimate03animate04possessing05possess06idea07real-life

A definitional loop anchored at life. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

7 hops · closes at life

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA