Word of the Day Archive
Monday February 12, 2007
vivify \VIV-uh-fy\
, transitive verb:
1. To endue with life; to make alive; to animate.
2. To make more lively or intense.
Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts?
-- Annie Dillard, "Write Till You Drop", New York Times, May 28, 1989
Stories not only provide context for statistical statements but can illustrate and vivify them as well.
-- John Allen Paulos, Once Upon a Number
They collaborated on, and for our benefit specialized in, like paleontologists, the painstaking reconstruction of vanished jokes from extant tag lines. They could vivify old New Yorker cartoons, source of many tag lines.
-- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood
Vivify comes from French vivifier, from Late Latin vivificare, from Latin vivus, alive.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for vivify
