animate

Formsanimates, animating, animated

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To set something in motion, or to give it the appearance of moving.

   Engineers animate the bridge model so they can watch how it sways in a strong wind.

   It took the studio three years to animate the dragon, one drawing at a time.

   Similarpropel, impel, actuate

   Oppositestop, halt

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To fill someone or something with spirit and vigor; to stir up or enliven.

   A surprise speech from the coach animated the tired team before the final quarter.

   Nothing seems to animate him like a good argument about baseball.

   Similarenliven, invigorate, energize, inspire, stimulate

   Oppositedeaden, dampen

   Note

   Spirit is the literal ingredient here: Latin animō already meant "to quicken, encourage," and to animate someone is to put anima, spirit, into them. Richard Knolles writes in 1603 of a leader standing on high "the more to animate the people." The object is a person or a crowd, and the subject is whatever stirs them: a speech, a cause, a good argument.

3. 3
   adjective

   Having life; alive rather than lifeless.

   The exhibit asks children to sort the objects on the table into animate and inanimate groups.

   Early philosophers puzzled over what separates animate creatures from the stones and streams around them.

   Similarliving, alive, live

   Oppositeinanimate, lifeless

   Note

   The root sense, and the one the word's history explains: Latin animātus meant "filled with breath," from anima, "breath, soul," so what is animate has the breath of life in it. The verb was built later on this adjective. It works best paired with inanimate, as a way of sorting the world into living things and lifeless ones.

4. 4
   adjective

   Full of energy and liveliness.

   Even at ninety, my grandmother was an animate storyteller who waved her hands as she talked.

   The lecture was animate and funny, and nobody checked a phone for an hour.

   Similarlively, energetic, animated, dynamic, vivacious

   Oppositestatic, sedentary

5. 5
   adjective

   Capable of motion; having the power to move.

   Some sea creatures are animate only as larvae, swimming freely before they fix themselves to a rock for life.

   After the restoration, the museum's clockwork figures are animate again, nodding and turning at the stroke of each hour.

   Similarmoving, mobile, motile

   Oppositeinanimate, static, sessile

6. 6
   adjective

   Of a noun or pronoun: referring to something considered alive, generally people, animals and deities, and sometimes plants or spirits.

   The grammar explains that nouns for spirits are treated as animate, even though spirits have no bodies.

   In the older dialect the word for sun was animate, but in the modern language it is inanimate.

   Oppositeinanimate

   Note

   Linguists use it for a grammatical category, not a biological one: each language draws its own line, and spirits or plants may fall on either side of it. In some languages animate and inanimate are the two genders a noun can have, much as other languages have masculine and feminine. Where the category runs deep, neighboring words change form to match, as in the agreement meaning.

7. 7
   adjective

   Having the inflected form a word takes when it agrees with an animate noun or pronoun.

   The adjective appears with its animate ending because it describes the word for grandmother.

   In the second sentence the verb is animate, agreeing with the noun for hunter rather than the noun for spear.

   Oppositeinanimate

   Note

   A label for a form rather than a meaning: a verb, an adjective or a demonstrative takes its animate ending because the noun it goes with is animate, not because it names anything alive itself. Grammars therefore speak of animate endings and animate agreement, set against inanimate ones; which nouns set it off is decided by the noun's own animacy.

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