Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To give life to; fill with life.
  • transitive verb To impart interest or zest to; enliven.
  • transitive verb To fill with spirit, courage, or resolution.
  • transitive verb To inspire to action; prompt.
  • transitive verb To impart motion or activity to.
  • transitive verb To make or depict using animation.
  • adjective Possessing life; living. synonym: living.
  • adjective Of or relating to animal life as distinct from plant life.
  • adjective Belonging to the class of nouns that stand for living things.
  • adjective Frequently moving; active or vigorous.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In grammar, referring to living things as indicated by a difference of form in the designating word: said of gender in some languages. See the quotation.
  • Alive; possessing animal life: as, “creatures animate,”
  • Having the appearance of life; resembling that which is alive; lively.
  • Pertaining to living things: as, “animate diseases,” Kirby and Spence, Entomol.
  • To give natural life to; quicken; make alive: as, the soul animates the body.
  • To affect with an appearance of life; inspire or actuate as if with life; bring into action or movement.
  • To move or actuate the mind of; incite to mental action; prompt.
  • To give spirit or vigor to; infuse courage, joy, or other enlivening passion into; stimulate: as, to animate dispirited troops.
  • Synonyms To vivify. To revive, invigorate. To enliven, stimulate, inspirit, exhilarate, cheer, gladden, impel, urge on, prompt, incite.
  • To become enlivened or exhilarated; rouse one's self.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Endowed with life; alive; living; animated; lively.
  • transitive verb To give natural life to; to make alive; to quicken.
  • transitive verb To give powers to, or to heighten the powers or effect of.
  • transitive verb To give spirit or vigor to; to stimulate or incite; to inspirit; to rouse; to enliven.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective That which lives.
  • adjective Possessing the quality or ability of motion.
  • adjective Dynamic, energetic.
  • adjective grammar Having a referent that includes a human or animal.
  • adjective grammar Inflected to agree with an animate noun or pronoun.
  • verb transitive To impart motion or the appearance of motion to.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective belonging to the class of nouns that denote living beings
  • adjective endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness
  • adjective endowed with animal life as distinguished from plant life
  • verb give new life or energy to
  • verb make lively
  • verb give lifelike qualities to
  • verb heighten or intensify

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin animāre, animāt-, from anima, soul; see anə- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin animatus, past participle of animare ("to fill with breath, quicken, encourage, animate"), from anima ("breath"); see anima.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word animate.

Examples

  • RegRead, Animate, HKCU, Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics, MinAnimate outputdebug animate is currently set to % animate%

    AutoHotkey Community 2010

  • Early vampires were portrayed as demons walking in animate dead corpses.

    Grave Vampire | SciFi, Fantasy & Horror Collectibles 2009

  • He and it are both appropriate, as in animate objects have zero feeling either.

    Think Progress » Rumsfeld: War Critics Being Manipulated By Zarqawi and Bin Laden’s ‘Media Committees’ 2006

  • Language, however, even if one imagines it as a certain animate creature (which would only be just), is not capable of ethical choice.

    Joseph Brodsky - Nobel Lecture 1987

  • Between a stone, which is part of the body of the earth, and a leaf which is part of the body of a plant, and a lock of hair which is part of the body of a man, there may be certain unimportant chemical differences, justifying us in using the terms animate and inanimate.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

  • We are faced with a "universe," then, made up entirely of living souls, manifested in so-called animate, or so-called inanimate bodies.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

  • Some of these souls possess what we name animate bodies, others possess what we name inanimate bodies.

    The Complex Vision John Cowper Powys 1917

  • Unlike other jQuery functions, animations are automatically queued, so if you want to run a second animation once the first is finished then just call the animate method twice, no callback necessary.

    The Daily Whim 2009

  • For example, humans certainly seem to have an innate facility with the concepts of numbers, with mental representations of the idea of animate agents, with the concept that the world is composed (in some way) of discrete objects, etc.

    3quarksdaily 2009

  • Another way to animate is to use your 3D application's built-in physics engines, such as when your scene requires that objects fall.

    WebReference News 2009

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.