livelong

21 January 2026

Livelong is not a common adjective. Its use, for the most part, is restricted to one expression, all the livelong day, although as late as the nineteenth century the livelong night was also common. In these expressions the word is simply an intensified version of the adjective long. But why live-? We don’t use that word to intensify anything else.

Well, the word goes back to the first half of the fifteenth century. Livelong is first recorded in Henry Lovelich’s poem The History of the Holy Grail, found in the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 80:

And thus vppon the yl stood Nasciens there
Al the live long day In this Manere.

(And thus upon the hill stood Nasciens there
all the livelong day in this manere.

And:

Al that leve longe Nyht
Into the Se he loked forth Ryht

(All that livelong night
he looked directly into the sea.)

Lovelich probably penned the poem around 1410. The manuscript dates from before 1450. And the date provides us with a clue for why live- is used in the word. The live- in livelong does not refer to living. Instead, it’s from the Old English leof, meaning dear, beloved. It shares a common Germanic root with the Old English lufu, or love.

There is a less common use of livelong to mean for a lifetime or lifelong. This sense appears in the late eighteenth century and would appear to be the result of a misanalysis of the word’s origin.

Sources:

Lovelich, Henry. The History of the Holy Grail, vols. 1–2. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1874, chap. 31, lines 69–70, 407. HathiTrust Digital Library.

———. The History of the Holy Grail, vol. 3. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society. London: N. Trübner, 1877, chap. 39, lines 319–20, 93. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 October 2025, s.v. leve-long, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2009, s.v. livelong, adj.; June 2008, s.v. love, n.1.