Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To give or bring life to; animate: vivify a puppet; vivifying the brown grasslands.
- v. To make more lively, intense, or striking; enliven: A smile may vivify a face.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To make to be living; endue with life; animate; enliven; inspire as if with life.
- To impart life or animation.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To endue with life; to make to be living; to quicken; to animate.
WordNet 3.0
- v. give new life or energy to
- v. make more striking or animated
Etymologies
- Latin vivus (alive), through late Latin vivificare and French vivifier (Wiktionary)
- Middle English vivifien, from Old French vivifier, from Late Latin vīvificāre : Latin vīvus, alive; see gwei- in Indo-European roots + Latin -ficāre, -fy. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“But if you don't "vivify" the mag, you miss the movies - the main attraction.”
“Authors in this genre now labor to find Gladwellian stories and characters to vivify the theories and studies that support their counterintuitive insights.”
“Her anguish over the unfairness of life and love can seem overwrought at times, but it's tolerable and really helps vivify her ordeals.”
“More spending -- a greater flow of money -- Hamilton understood, would "vivify and invigorate the channels of industry, and make them flow with greater activity and copiousness.”
The Huffington Post: Paul A. London: The Politics of Discrediting America
“To a man and a woman, they vivify Dostoyevsky's wildly diverse and possessed-by-inner-demons figures.”
“Under them, the entire company -- most notably McLeavy as a tender-tough Stella and Tim Richards as unpolished but compassionate gentleman-caller Mitch -- vivify a revival that works to remind anyone who's forgotten that here's one of the handful of preeminent 20-century American plays.”
David Finkle: Blanchett as Blanche in Tennessee Williams's Streetcar Named Desire
“In order to have a long view of history, of capital accumulation in few hands, to vivify our past, to nurture a healthy memory, to develop theoretical and class consciousness and knowledge, we always have to check out what we have said and what we were doing in the immediate past.”
Venezuela: Beware, Big Business enters the Orinoco Delta and with it a coming Big War!
“Jaswant Singh and Jinnah mercifully conspire to vivify the publishing industry.”
“The GOP is in a weakened state and something does have to be done to vivify the Party.”
“Thence must issue those poignant darts that newly vivify the expiring embers of languishing love. ”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘vivify’.
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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2046 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Philosophic , etymology
every major discipline has uniquely developed esoteric nomenclature to facilitate interdisciplinary dissemination
quale , qualia, elegy, tacet, lexicon, annunciate, caste, eros, contrive, purlicue, irony, venacular, dilapidate and 567 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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nachchba's Words
stentorian, blasé, ennui, concinnity, melee, photokeratitis, skiffle, refulgence, mongrel, fakir, caid, eudaimonia and 215 more...
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Verba Dilecta
delectable, notate, pauciloquy, paucity, pauciloquent, paucify, interscapilium, uropygium, inferna, nota, equipollent, prepollent and 677 more...
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quality words
This is a mix of new words I've read studying for the GRE verbal and words I use normally. I also check back on these words if I don't use them often enough.
ineffable, septuagenarian, sesquipedalian, argyle, coalescence, profundity, vivisepulture, defenestrate, concatenate, usurp, diatribe, veracious and 461 more...
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Lively Words
quick, quicksilver, cwic, quitch grass, cwice, vivify, viviparous, viper, weever, wyvern, viand, victual and 148 more...
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There's a word for that?
temerity, tacit, froward, faineant, caterwaul, menagerie, ennui, sine qua non, lissom, multifarious, laconic, katzenjammer and 240 more...
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The Last Werewolf
This novel by Glen Duncan, aside from being a ripping yarn and beautifully written, is just littered with words that I had to look up and discover that often his use of the word not only fitted per...
gurns, bok, chimney breast, dichotomy, Platonic form, filthy, Platonic Form, mathematics, BAM, skirls, clarity, blundering and 298 more...
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Mollusque's miscellany
A mixture of words that I like or have commented on, along with ones parked here so they'd be listed somewhere or remind me of lists I want to make.
oranger, monographer, preoccupied, bu, bobization, coinventor, tetrapyloctomy, borgmannian, suspercollate, manhug, mancrush, obituarist and 604 more...
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ADW1
obdurate, obstinate, behest, injunction, enjoin, circumspect, ensconce, discursive, lugubrious, doleful, somber, ken and 2476 more...
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discoveries
These are lexical items new to me that I've discovered in actual use (i.e. not in dictionaries, lists, or this site).
Looking back over this list, I haven't the slightest idea what mos...haymow, hawsepipe, stridor, bariatric, autotelic, apotropaic, cyanotype, tourelle, autobody, zudecca, stifado, corbeille and 1073 more...
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Zooey's list
cosmology, consummate, demiurge, paradisiacal, reconnaissance, intransigent, otiose, zeitgeist, coalesce, zeitgeber, absolve, abstruse and 105 more...
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Misc. Words.
Words I like to use, words I like but may forget.
corrosion, astonish, solace, ferment, continuum, kinesthetic, permeate, repose, caprice, cardinal, discourse, surrender and 610 more...
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whitmanian
from the poetry and prose of walt whitman
celebrate, assume, loafe, grass, summer, distillation, atmosphere, undisguised, naked, mad, breath, loveroot and 291 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for vivify.
Louises See vivifies examples Mar 25, 2012
qroqqa And with the will came the Act and so at last
He vivified naked form devoid of reason.
—Lawrence Durrell, 'Poemandres'
Listed as a discovery because I don't think I've ever seen the plain form 'vivify', as opposed to the familiar 'revivify'. Mar 17, 2009
whichbe Got this one 3 times today via 'random'. Weird, huh? Oct 23, 2008
brtom Chants of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota,
Chants going forth from the centre from Kansas, and thence
equidistant,
Shooting in pulses of fire ceaseless to vivify all.
Whitman, "Starting from Paumanok" Jan 9, 2008