lives

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of live.

   The artist lives above the gallery where her work hangs.

   Whoever lives here clearly loves gardening.

   Note

   The -s form agrees with a single third-person subject: she lives, the shop lives, whoever lives here. Other persons take bare live. It carries every sense of the verb, from residing somewhere to the informal 'proper place' use (the spare key lives in that drawer) to enduring in memory (his name lives on). The same spelling also serves as the plural of life, and only the sentence tells them apart.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of life.

   The new safety rules were written to protect workers' lives.

   War reshaped the lives of everyone in the village.

   Note

   An irregular plural: the voiceless f of life becomes a voiced v before the ending, as in knife and knives or wife and wives. The plural belongs mainly to the countable sense of a particular being alive. That is why it turns up when counting the lost and the saved: lives were lost, lives were saved. Life as the general state of being alive rarely takes a plural at all.

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