Vivid means so bright and alive that it seems to be happening right in front of you. A vivid orange sky over wet roofs; a dream so vivid that you check in the morning whether it really happened.
It runs on two tracks, colour and the mind's pictures: vivid green and vivid blue on one side, a vivid memory, a vivid description and a vivid imagination on the other. A vivid writer makes you see the room; a child with a vivid imagination invents whole countries with railways in them. The adverb is vividly, as in I remember it vividly, and the noun is vividness. Vivid is warmer than sharp and stronger than bright, because it points at life rather than at light. In New Zealand a vivid is also a marker pen, taken from an old brand name, which surprises everybody else.
1adjectivebrilliantVery bright and strong in colour.
“The vivid red of the poppies showed up from the far side of the field.”
2adjectivegraphicProducing sharp, lifelike pictures in the mind.
“She gave a vivid account of the night the river came up.”
synonyms: graphic, lifelike
3adjectivevividOf a memory or a dream: felt as clearly as the real thing.
“He still has vivid dreams about the old house.”
Vivid is Latin vividus, animated or spirited, from vivo, to live, and it belongs to the same family as vita, life, and Greek bios. The ancient root behind them all is gweyh-, the root of living itself. So a vivid colour is, quite exactly, a living colour.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʷeyh₃-
Latin
vīvidus
English, today
vivid
Built from
Learned borrowing from Latin vīvidus. Latin vividus (“animated, spirited”), from vivo (“to live”), akin to vita (“life”), Ancient Greek βίος (“life”). The noun sense (a type of marker pen) was genericized from Bic's Vivid Marker brand.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA