Survivor

How to spell survivor

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce survivor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does survivor mean?

1. nounA person who remains alive after an event, illness, or hardship that others did not come through.

Survivor in a sentence

• The lone survivor of the crash was treated for minor injuries.

• As the only survivor named in the will, she inherited the entire estate.

Where does survivor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb supervivere, which combined super, meaning 'over' or 'beyond', with vivere, meaning 'to live', so it literally described someone who 'lives beyond' or outlasts a danger or another person. The Romans used it for outliving relatives, a sense still alive in legal language about heirs. English took it through Anglo-Norman and Old French, where the verb appeared as survivre, and by the fifteenth century 'survive' was established in English. The agent ending '-or', taken straight from Latin, marks the doer, giving us 'one who survives'; this is why the word ends in -or rather than the more common -er. The same vivere root nourishes a whole family of familiar words such as 'vivid', 'revive', and 'vivacious', all carrying the idea of life, and remembering that 'viv' means 'to live' helps fix the middle of the spelling.

How the word is built

• sur- (from super-: over, beyond)
• viv (from vivere: to live)
• -or (agent noun suffix: one who does)