Two spellings, two lives
In ordinary English, live is first of all a verb: to be alive, to go on existing, to get through a day or a century. We live in towns, live on bread or a salary, live through illness, and live a quiet life or a false one. The same letters also write a later adjective, said with a different vowel, that marks what is still active rather than stored or spent: a live animal, a live wire, live ammunition, a live concert. The verb rhymes with give; the adjective rhymes with five. They look like one word. They are not one history.
The origin of the word live as a verb is native Germanic English. It was not taken from French or Latin. Old English already used it, in more than one dialect shape, long before the modern spelling settled.
Old English libban and lifian
West Saxon wrote the verb as libban. Anglian wrote lifian, with further spellings such as lifġan in northern and poetic texts. Both were weak verbs. Their range was already wide: to have life, to continue in life, to experience existence, to feed oneself and keep body and household going, and to pass one’s days in a particular manner. Those uses are not later add-ons. They sit in the earliest English record of the word.
Middle English inherited a thicket of forms: liven, lyven, libben, lifen, and still others, some closer to West Saxon, some to Anglian. Scots kept a related form leeve. Modern dictionaries that date first written use put the verb before the twelfth century, which is a cautious way of saying it is an Old English inheritance rather than a medieval borrowing. The modern spelling live is only the last of a long line of written shapes.
Across the North Sea the verb is common property. Old Frisian had libba, Old Saxon libbian, Old High German lebēn (German leben), Dutch leven, Old Norse lifa, and Gothic liban. Historical linguists reconstruct a Proto-Germanic verb, often written *libjaną, sometimes with a slightly different reconstructed vocalism. Old Norse is a useful witness: lifa could mean to live, but also to be left behind, and of a fire, to keep burning. In that family, remaining and living are neighbouring ideas, not distant metaphors.
From sticking to remaining
The English noun life is the verb’s partner. Old English līf comes from a Germanic noun that etymologists gloss as continuance or perseverance: life as what keeps on. Leave, in the sense of allowing something to remain, is a causative built on the same remain-root. Alive is later still: a contraction of Old English on līfe, in life, which was still written in fuller form into the early modern period. Lively is the older native adjective of the same cluster, meaning living or full of life, and it is older than the clipped adjective live.
Behind that Germanic group, standard handbooks reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European root *leip- (also given as *leyp-). Its first reconstructed sense is to stick or adhere; it also feeds words for fat and greasiness, such as Greek lipos. From sticking, the root is taken to have developed a sense remain, continue. Only in Germanic, on the usual account, did remaining become living. Notes on the noun life record that this last step is Germanic-only and not beyond dispute, even though the path from cling to remain to live is easy to follow. A smaller group of specialists has preferred a different deep source, PIE *leikʷ- leave or abandon, because it matches the remain and be-left meanings more directly. The phonology of that alternative is not agreed. What is solid is the Germanic verb of living; the Indo-European attachment is a reasoned reconstruction, not a closed case.
Outside Germanic, the same sticky root is usually credited with Greek liparein to persist, Lithuanian lipti to stick, and English liver as the organ, grouped with fatty or adhesive senses rather than with the verb live itself. Those are distant relatives of the root, not extra copies of the English word.
After Old English: dwelling, intensity, and a new adjective
The core sense to be alive does not need a later invention. What grew after Old English is the social and figurative ring around it. From about 1200 the verb is recorded for making a residence, the dwelling use that now feels basic. In the 1540s it can mean to enact something in one’s conduct, as when a person lives a lie. Around 1600 an intensified reading appears: not merely to stay breathing, but to use life’s chances. Later English adds live up to a standard in the late seventeenth century, live with as cohabitation in the eighteenth and as endurance in the twentieth, live something down in the nineteenth, and live it up in the early twentieth. The proverbial pairing live and learn is early seventeenth-century; a Dutch proverb of living and letting live was already being cited in English in 1622.
The adjective is a separate clipping. From the 1540s, live meaning having life, not dead, is an aphetic shortening of alive. That is why English prefers a live animal but he is alive: the shortened form is mainly attributive, placed before a noun. From the 1610s it describes burning coals and glowing fire; from the 1640s, things full of force; from the end of the eighteenth century, unspent power, as in live ammunition. An electrical live wire is recorded in 1890; the figurative energetic person follows in 1903. The performance sense, in person and not recorded, is attested by 1917. Speakers keep the histories apart by the vowel. The older adjective of the native family remains lively.
What remaining still means
A concrete remnant of the older idea sits in the Norse and Gothic company of the verb. To live was, in Germanic, to remain: a fire that still burns, a person left after others have gone, a body that continues through the night. English later split one spelling into two pronunciations, so that a live broadcast and the wish to live long look identical and sound unlike. The verb is the older of the two, inherited from Old English libban and lifian, and it still carries that sense of continuance whenever someone is said to have lived through what might have ended them.