lifelike

What it means

1. obsoleteLikely to live.First known use 1610s
2. Like a living being; resembling life; being an accurate representation.First known use 1725

   a lifelike portrait

   3 more examples

   The robot was so lifelike, Jack could hardly tell it apart from his sister.

   The stories did not seem to me to touch life. […] They left me with the impression of a well-delivered stereopticon lecture, with characters about as life-like as the shadows on the screen, and whisking on and off, at the mercy of the operator.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter I, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

   But part of the movie’s nonstop fun is the way [Christopher] McQuarrie taps back into the genre’s (and this series’) games of subterfuge, misdirection, and indeterminate loyalties, beginning with the fiendishly clever rug-pull of its worst-case-scenario prologue and epitomized by the goofily irresistible sight of characters dramatically ripping off lifelike rubber masks.

   2018 July 25, A. A. Dowd, “Fallout may be the Most Breathlessly Intense Mission: Impossible Adventure Yet”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 31 Jul 2018

In a sentence

a lifelike portrait

Where it comes from

1. Proto-Indo-European*leyp-
2. Proto-Germanic*lībaną
3. Proto-Germanic*lībą
4. Proto-West Germanic*līb
5. Old Englishlīf
6. Middle Englishlyf
7. Englishlife
8. Proto-Indo-European*leyg-
9. Proto-Germanic*līką
10. Englishlifelike

From life + -like. First attested in the 1610s.

First known use: 1610s