Livid means extremely angry — furious to the point of being unable to speak calmly. She was livid about it. He came back livid.
It is informal and it is one of the strongest anger words in ordinary British speech, above cross and annoyed and beside furious. The older meaning is quite different and still turns up in writing about injuries: livid means a bluish-grey colour, which is what a bad bruise looks like. That is the original sense, and the anger sense grew from the colour a face goes — though English chose the wrong colour, since rage tends to redden rather than to bruise.
1adjectivelividExtremely angry.
“She was livid when she found out.”
2adjectivebruiseOf a bruise or the skin, dark bluish-grey.
“There was a livid mark across his cheek.”
livid is a degree of anger.
Latin lividus meant bluish or leaden, from a root meaning the colour of a bruise. Latin also used it to mean envious, which is the same idea as green with envy in English: a strong feeling named by the colour it was thought to turn you.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)leh₃y-
Middle English
livid
English, today
livid
Built from
From Middle English livid. From Middle English livid, livide, from Old French livide, from Latin līvidus (“bluish, livid; envious”), from līveō (“be of a bluish color or livid; envy”), from Proto-Italic sliwēō, from Proto-Indo-European sliwo-, suffixed form of (s)leh₃y- (“bluish”). See also Old English slā (“sloe”), Welsh lliw (“splendor, color”), Old Irish li, Lithuanian slyvas (“plum”), and Russian - and cu - слива (“plum”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Feelings & Character, Moods & Relationships