What speakers mean by it now
In present-day English, life is the everyday name for being alive: the condition that marks organisms off from dead tissue and from things that never lived, the span between birth and death, and the particular way a person or community spends that span. The same noun gathers living things as a class, as in marine life, a written account of someone, raw vitality, a prison term that lasts until death, and even an extra turn in a game. That load looks modern, but a large part of it was already in the language before 1150.
Inherited, not borrowed
The origin of the word life is native Germanic inheritance, not a medieval loan from Latin vita or French vie. Old English used the neuter noun līf, often spelled life in manuscripts, with a dative lif. It already covered animated bodily existence, a lifetime, a manner of living, and the opposite of death. It could also mean a person’s history from birth to death and, in Christian prose, spiritual existence given to the believer. Middle English kept the stem as lyf or lif. The later spelling life and the irregular plural lives grew from that same native form; they are not a new word.
First English use belongs to the Old English period. There is no documentary gap that would suggest the noun dropped out and returned from abroad. Forms built on it stayed in the same household: alive is derived from this noun rather than from the verb live, and lively belongs with them.
Remaining, then living
Behind Old English līf stand Proto-West Germanic līb and Proto-Germanic lībą, reconstructed with the paired senses life and body. The noun is usually taken as related to the verb lībaną, to remain or be left. The English verb live is the close partner: Old English libban in West Saxon and lifian in Anglian continue a Proto-Germanic verb whose literal idea is to continue or stay on.
Etymologists commonly push the family back to a Proto-Indo-European root written leip- or leyp-, whose older meanings are to stick or adhere, and by extension a fatty or sticky substance. From clinging, some daughter languages developed remain and continue. Greek, for instance, has related vocabulary for fat and for persisting. The last step, remain becoming live, is a Germanic development. The path is easy to follow on paper, and a similar remain sense appears outside Germanic, but the specific leap to live is confined to Germanic and is still disputed. It is a plausible reconstruction, not a closed case.
A popular gloss of that leap is that remaining after a fight meant still being alive. That scene may help memory; it is not proof. Morphologically the English noun is a single inherited stem, not a prefix plus a root, and folk splits that try to parse it into other modern English pieces are not supported.
Cousins that drifted toward the body
The same Germanic noun is easy to spot around the North Sea. Old Norse and modern Icelandic líf still mean life and can also mean body. Swedish and Danish liv keep life; Faroese has lív. Old Saxon and Old Frisian had līf. Farther south the meaning slid toward flesh: Dutch lijf and German Leib are body words, while Dutch leven and German Leben carry life. Scots keeps life or leif.
That fork is the clearest comparative fact. English parked existence, duration, and biography on life and used body for the physical frame. German and Dutch largely assigned the old cognate to the torso and built a different noun for being alive. The verbs stayed closer: German leben, Dutch leven, Old Norse lifa.
If the Indo-European reconstruction is accepted, more distant English relatives sit nearby: leave, in the sense of letting something remain, and liver, the organ, which some handbooks connect to the same sticky or fatty root. Those links are reconstructions several steps removed from the modern noun. They should not be read as parts you can still hear inside life.
Older English also used the noun for a person, a sense still visible in Icelandic pairings of life and soul and, later, in Middle English lines where lyf means somebody. That personal use faded in standard English; the biological and biographical uses did not.
Later layers on an old range
Old English already asked one noun to do many jobs. Later centuries added technical and social senses rather than replacing the core. By the 1560s, writers used life for the property that distinguishes living matter from the rest. Vitality and energy in action are recorded from the 1580s. Around 1590, the life could mean a living model, the basis of drawing from life. In the early eighteenth century the word stretched to how long an inanimate thing lasts, the working life of an object. By the 1770s it could mean the conspicuous social side of existence; life of the party is on record from 1787.
Imprisonment for life, a life sentence, appears around 1903. Games took an older idea of extra chances in cards and billiards and turned it into an extra life for a character. Compounds show the stem as a productive first element: life-preserver first for anything that saved a person, later for a flotation device; life-jacket from 1840; life-form from 1861.
The biography sense, already present in Old English as a person’s history, was likely reinforced by Medieval Latin vita, the usual label for saints’ lives and other written accounts. That is influence on meaning, not a replacement of the English word.
English, like Latin vita, has one ordinary noun where Classical Greek could split two quite different ideas of living. Commentators have long noted that this forces English speakers to load unlike notions onto the same form. That is a fact about usage. It does not change the etymology: the Germanic word arrived already wide and kept gathering more.
What the German cousin still shows
The most concrete leftover is a split among relatives, not a single first-attestation year. In English, life is still existence. In German, Leib is a body. Both continue the same Germanic noun that once meant continuance. English never needed to import a substitute. The word stayed, which, on the cautious older reading of the root, is close to what the stem itself once named.