Other forms: reliving, relives, relived
To relive is to experience something again in memory. Relive the moment, relive the past, relive it every night.
It means feeling it again rather than merely remembering, which is the whole difference — and reliving a traumatic event involuntarily is a defining feature of post-traumatic stress, so the word carries real clinical weight. Of a happy memory it is warm. Note that relive is stressed on the second syllable, which distinguishes it from anything else.
1verbreliveTo experience something again in memory.
“Every time he hears that song, he relives the night they first met.”
relive is a re-experiencing.
Proto-Indo-European
*leyp-
Middle English
lefe
English
live
English, today
relive
Built from
From re- + live. live comes from Middle English lefe. From Middle English lefe, lifen, libbe, libben, live, luvien, lyven, from Old English libban, lifian (“to live; be alive”), from Proto-West Germanic libbjan, from Proto-Germanic libjaną (“to live”), from Proto-Indo-European leyp- (“to stick”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA