life: [OE] Prehistoric Germanic *līb- denoted ‘remain, be left’. From this was formed the noun *lībam, which in due course produced English life (the semantic connection between ‘remaining’ and life – and the closely related live – is thought to lie in the notion of being ‘left alive after a battle’). Of the noun’s Germanic relatives, Swedish and Danish liv still mean ‘life’, but German leib and Dutch liff have moved on semantically to ‘body’. English alive is a derivative of life, not of the verb live. => live[life etymology, life origin, 英语词源]