Livelihood

How to spell livelihood

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce livelihood

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does livelihood mean?

1. nounA means of securing the necessities of life, especially the way a person earns money to live.

Livelihood in a sentence

• The new factory provides a livelihood for hundreds of local families.

• The flood destroyed crops and threatened the farmers' livelihood.

Where does livelihood come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Livelihood comes from the Old English compound liflad, which joined lif, meaning 'life', with lad, meaning 'a way, course, or journey'. So the original sense was literally 'the course of one's life' or 'a way of living', rather than specifically a means of earning money. The lad element is the same root that survives in the modern word 'lode' (a vein of ore) and in 'lodestar', a guiding star, all carrying the idea of a path or course. Over time the unfamiliar ending was reshaped by folk association with the common suffix '-hood' (as in childhood and neighbourhood) and with the word 'lively', which is why the modern spelling looks like 'lively' plus 'hood'. By the sixteenth century the meaning had narrowed to the means by which a person supports themselves, the sense we use today. The trap in spelling it lies precisely in that middle: it is 'live-li-hood', echoing 'lively', not 'live-le-hood'.

How the word is built

• live (from Old English lif: life)
• -li- (from Old English lad: course or way, later reshaped)
• -hood (state or condition)