livingly
English edit
Etymology edit
Adverb edit
livingly (comparative more livingly, superlative most livingly)
- In actual living experience; really, vitally.
- 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
- Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
- 1887, Julian Hawthorne, “Literature for Children”, in Confessions and Criticisms:
- If we believed—if the great mass of people known as the civilized world did actually and livingly believe—that there was really anything beyond or above the physical order of nature, our children's literature, wrongly so called, would not be what it is.
- 1922, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, “Sleep and Dreams”, in Fantasia of the Unconscious, New York, N.Y.: Thomas Seltzer, →OCLC, page 104:
- A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons who, in some way, oppose his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance.
- Realistically; as if experienced in life or as if alive.
- 1849 July, Charles Kingsley, “North Devon”, in Prose Idylls, New and Old, London: Macmillan and Co., published 1873, →OCLC, page 248:
- It was so strange, to have that gay Italian bay, with all its memories, […] and those great old heroes, with their awful deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and livingly before me, […]
- c. 1889, Samuel Butler, “How To Make the Best of Life”, in Essays on Life, Art and Science:
- Take an extreme case. A group of people are photographed by Edison's new process—say Titiens, Trebelli, and Jenny Lind, with any two of the finest men singers the age has known—let them be photographed incessantly for half an hour while they perform a scene in "Lohengrin"; let all be done stereoscopically. Let them be phonographed at the same time so that their minutest shades of intonation are preserved, let the slides be coloured by a competent artist, and then let the scene be called suddenly into sight and sound, say a hundred years hence. Are those people dead or alive? Dead to themselves they are, but while they live so powerfully and so livingly in us, which is the greater paradox—to say that they are alive or that they are dead?
- 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Beggars”, in Across the Plains: With Other Memories and Essays, London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC, page 261:
- You should have heard him speak of what he loved; […] Here was a piece of experience solidly and livingly built up in words, here was a story created, teres atque rotundus.
Further reading edit
- John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “livingly”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.
- “livingly”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.