noun
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the quality or condition of being vivacious
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rare (often plural) a vivacious act or expression
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of vivacity
1400–50; late Middle English < Latin vīvācitās, equivalent to vīvāc- (stem of vīvāx long-lived, lively, equivalent to vīv ( us ) alive ( see vital) + -āx adj. suffix) + -i- -i- + -tās -ty 2
Explanation
If someone says you're full of vivacity, that means you have high spirits and are full of life. Your vivacity makes you a great comedic actor because you attack the stage with endless energy. Vivacity comes from the Latin vīvācitāt-, meaning "life force," and shares a root with the word vital. You may know from medical dramas that if someone's vital signs are not good, that means he's dying. But if he is full of vivacity, that means the opposite: he's totally energetically fully alive! If you don't have much vivacity, don't become a motivational speaker.
Vocabulary lists containing vivacity
"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe
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A Streetcar Named Desire
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Stories of Ourselves
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
To put it plainly: Julian’s imitations lacked the vivacity that made his art unique, resulting in an uncanny dissonance between idea and result.
From Salon ● Apr. 17, 2026
She said the 76-year old mother-of-four and grandmother-of-five was "a phenomenal person - full of vivacity and fun".
From BBC ● Sep. 17, 2024
The crisp acoustic of the recently renovated hall enhanced Ligeti’s rhythmic vivacity.
From New York Times ● Nov. 3, 2023
Jeffers and Hay have a strong chemistry, and they make Peter and Winona’s vivacity and pain feel equally real, even when the movie around them is shading toward the phony.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 9, 2023
Not that Trabb’s boy was of a malignant nature, but that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was in his constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody’s expense.
From "Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens
How much ten years did at this time, one is apt to forget; and how irregularly the slower minds of the older men would surrender themselves, sadly, or awkwardly, to the vivacities of their pupils.
From Val d'Arno by John Ruskin
Excellence in style demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable sequence.
From Essays Æsthetical by George H. (George Henry) Calvert
His sympathies are unlimited; and those who think him inferior to Tasso, only do so in consequence of their own want of sympathy with the vivacities that degrade him in their eyes.
From Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 2 by Torquato Tasso
Pardon me certain vivacities of style, which I had not time to correct, and plunge boldly into the heart of the book.
From The Roman Question by Edmond About
Without some sharpness of interest I shouldn't now have the memories; but these stick to me somehow with none of the hard glue of recovered "spirits," recovered vivacities, assurances, successes.
From A Small Boy and Others by Henry James
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
