Lived

How to spell lived

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lived

What does lived mean?

1. verbPast tense of 'live': to have existed, been alive, or resided somewhere.
2. adjectiveHaving a life of a specified kind or length, used in compounds such as short-lived or long-lived.

Lived in a sentence

• verb

  She lived in a small flat near the station for three years.

• adjective

  The enthusiasm for the new policy proved short-lived once costs rose.

• verb

  The old farmer lived to the age of ninety-six.

• adjective

  Tortoises are famously long-lived animals.

Where does lived come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'live', which descends from the Old English verb libban (also written lifian), meaning 'to be alive' or 'to dwell'. That verb belonged to the same family of Germanic words as Old English lif, the ancestor of modern 'life', and the close kinship between 'live' and 'life' is exactly why the spelling can trip people up. Across the Germanic languages relatives survive in Dutch leven and German leben, all carrying the same core sense of having existence and breath. The adjectival use seen in compounds such as 'short-lived' and 'long-lived' was actually formed from the noun 'life' rather than the verb, which is why some careful speakers give it a long vowel, as in 'lyved'. By the time it settled into modern spelling, the simple past kept the regular pattern of adding -ed to a verb ending in a silent e, so 'live' loses its final e and gains -ed to make 'lived'.

How the word is built

• live (from Old English libban: to be alive, to dwell)
• -ed (past tense / participial suffix)