Other forms: lives
Life is the state of being alive, and also the time between birth and death. Life on earth, all his life, a happy life.
The plural is lives, with a v, and that irregular plural catches people out in writing. It is uncountable for the general phenomenon — life is complicated — and countable for a particular one: three lives were lost. Note the enormous range of fixed phrases: get a life, that's life, the time of your life, larger than life, and life imprisonment, which in Britain means a sentence with a minimum term rather than the whole of one.
1nounstateThe state of being alive.~62%
“There is no life at all in that pond now.”
2nounlifeThe time between birth and death.~18%
“She lived in the same street her whole life.”
3nounlivesThe way somebody lives.~18%
“It is a quiet life and it suits them.”
4nounenergyEnergy and liveliness.~2%
“The place came to life at about ten.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
life is a state of being alive.
Old English lif comes from a root meaning to remain or continue, and the same root gives live, alive and leave in the sense of remaining. Life is what stays, which is a quieter idea than the modern word carries.
Proto-Indo-European
*leyp-
Middle English
lyf
English, today
life
Built from
From Middle English lyf. 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”), stq Lieuw (“body”), West Frisian liif (“body”), cim laip (“body”), Dutch lijf (“body”) and leven (“life”), German Leib (“body; womb”) and Leben (“life”), Low German Lief (“body; life”), lb Leif, Läif (“body”), wym łaowa (“life”), Yiddish לײַב (“body”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish liv (“life; waist”), Faroese lív (“life”), Icelandic líf (“life”). Related to belive.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA