come alive

Idioms  

1. Also, come to life.

2. Become vigorous or lively. For example, It took some fast rhythms to make the dancers come alive , or As soon as he mentioned ice cream, the children came to life . The adjective alive has been used in the sense of “vivacious” since the 1700s. Also, the variant originally (late 1600s) meant “to recover from a faint or apparent death.” [ Colloquial ; first half of 1900s]

3. Appear real or believable, as in It's really hard to make this prose come to life . Also see look alive .

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

come alive

But Maine is also home to charming hotels and harbor towns with seafood restaurants and seaside promenades that come alive in warm weather.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 20, 2026

Shares of companies that rode high and survived the dot-com bust — but were then relegated to the tech sector’s back ranks during the decades that followed — have suddenly come alive again.

From MarketWatch ● May 15, 2026

The portraits on the wall, whose characters occasionally come alive, start to envelop us.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 14, 2026

"Against vast skies, rolling hills and shifting weather the pair seemed to come alive - timeless guardians of the landscape."

From BBC ● Mar. 15, 2026

When they breathed life back into her, she glowed again, a place for memories to be cast in silver, for breathless whispers and longing gazes, for stories to come alive and live endlessly.

From "Night Owls" by A.R. Vishny