live [OE] In the sense ‘to be alive’, live goes back to the same root as *life. The other live, with a different pronunciation, is a mid 16th-century shortening of alive [OE]. The proverb live and let live is identified as Dutch in the earliest known reference, from 1622. Live and Let Die, the 1954 James Bond book, filmed in 1973, subverted it. The rhyme ‘He who fights and runs away / Lives to fight another day’ [E18th] gives us the phrase live to fight another day. The idea is found in the works of the Greek comic playwright Menander, who lived from around 342 to 292 bc.