Mastodawn

It will come as no surprise that ‘to live’ is etymologically related to ‘life’ and ‘alive’.

However, these words are also related to ‘to leave’ and German ‘bleiben’ (“to stay”), which used to have an English cognate: ‘to belive’.

Even ‘lipo-’ in ‘liposuction’ is related, as are the parts ‘-lev-’ and ‘-lv-’ of the numerals ‘eleven’ and ‘twelve’.

All of these words stem from a common Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to stick”.

Click my new graphic to learn all about this word family:

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Bart Groeneveld 4d ago

@yvanspijk I am a bit confused on how it went from 'to stay' to 'to leave'. The meaning switched to the complete opposite?

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Leen Kievit 3d ago

@bartavi @yvanspijk I assume this is the sense of 'to leave behind', letting something stay where it is.

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Yoïn van Spijk

@lnkvt @bartavi Exactly. *Laibijanan was a so-called causative: with it, you expressed causing something or someone to stay, leaving them behind. It's like 'to lay down something or someones': you cause them to lie down.