come alive

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]
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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Idioms and Phrases

Also, come to life .

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

The painstaking labor, however, pays off the first time the finished product comes alive.

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"All he could remember was a DJ who between every song said, 'Spike Island come alive, Spike Island come alive'," he said.

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Almost everywhere I turned something came alive — a sleeping dragon waking up, a baby dragon cracking out of an egg or a husky dragon cooling us off with a cold blast of air.

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When Kidman gets to play with Nancy and press into her idiosyncrasies like she’s done in other madcap roles, “Holland” briefly comes alive.

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She flicks through the pages and that number written in red comes alive with the memories of the individuals she saved, and the ones she lost.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

come again?come-all-ye

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