revival

The general sense from which the others branch: the verb revive plus the noun-forming -al, the same pattern as arrival and survival. It names both the act and the resulting state, so it works countably (a revival) and uncountably. The narrower meanings take it into particular fields, such as religious awakening or the legal restoration.

Much of its work is done as a label placed after a style or genre. Post-punk revival and jungle revival name music scenes, and Tudor revival names a building style, as in Tudor revival-style buildings. In the theater it has a narrower meaning: a new staging of an earlier production, which is why a critic can write of a revival of a revival. Elsewhere it is often uncountable, as in revival of interest.

Fashions and habits often come back by decade, and the word readily takes the decade as its modifier. Kat Frey used "a very sexy and ethereal 1980s revival" to explain why smoking was back. The returning thing follows of: the revival of hot pants. Where the cultural flourishing is about something thriving again, this sense is about something becoming common again.

In television, cancellation is not always the end. A revival may arrive years later, sometimes on a different network or streaming platform, and often aims to give an abruptly ended show a proper ending. A stage revival in the cultural sense remounts an old production. A television revival instead continues the story with new episodes.

Historians use the plural for separate waves of fervor: the revivals that "died down in the 1740s," or the Great Awakening and "other religious revivals in America." Their promoters were revivalists, as Michael P. Young's Bearing Witness Against Sin (2006) calls them. The word is not limited to Christianity. Megan Adamson Sijapati's Islamic Revival in Nepal (2012) applies it to a growing Islamic movement.

The concrete event takes its name from the awakening it hopes to produce. In this sense a revival is something a congregation organizes, schedules and attends, often with guest preachers. It is a specific occasion, while the wider religious awakening describes a period or movement. Context separates them: a week-long revival is a meeting, but the revivals of the 1740s were a movement.

Lawyers apply it to things that once had legal force and then lost it. A debt barred by limitation can be revived, and so can a revoked will. The revival restores the original instrument's effect rather than creating a new one. The usual construction is revival of plus the lapsed thing, and the same word covers reinstating a legal action that had stopped.

An older chemical term and a shorter equivalent of revivification. The metal is pictured as brought back to life when it is freed from an oxide or salt, typically by heating it with a reducing agent. Modern chemistry calls the same process reduction, so this use belongs mostly to older chemical writing.