Other forms: livelier, liveliest
Lively means full of energy and movement. A lively child, a lively debate, a lively atmosphere.
It is warm about people and places and slightly guarded about meetings: a lively discussion often means an argument. Of a market or trade it means busy. Note that lively is an adjective despite the -ly ending, which is a trap — the adverb is in a lively way, because there is no livelily. Several English adjectives do this: friendly, likely, silly and lonely all look like adverbs and are not.
1adjectivelivelyFull of energy and movement.
“The children were lively and noisy after the party.”
synonyms: energetic, spirited
lively is a quality of energy.
Also accepted in games: energetic
Old English liflic means life-like or living — lif, life, plus -lic, the ancestor of -ly meaning having the form of. So lively means having the shape of life, and its -ly is the adjective one rather than the adverb one.
Proto-West Germanic
*lībalīk — living, lively
Old English
līflīċ — living, lively, long-lived, necessary to life, vital
Middle English
lyvely
English, today
lively
From Middle English lyvely, lifly, from Old English līflīċ (“living, lively, long-lived, necessary to life, vital”), from Proto-West Germanic lībalīk (“living, lively”), equivalent to life + ly. Cognate with Scots lively, lifely (“of or pertaining to life, vital, living, life-like”), Old High German līblīh (“living, animated”), German leiblich (“bodily, corporeal”). a doublet of lifely and lifelike.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA