survive [LME] Survive entered English via Old French from Latin supervivere, based on vivere ‘to live’, as in revive [LME], vivacious [M17th], vivacity [LME], and vivid [M17th]. According to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, those animals and plants which tend to survive and produce more offspring are the ones best adapted to their environment summed up in the phrase the survival of the fittest, which was coined by the English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer in Principles of Biology (1865). Darwin himself had originally used the term natural selection, but approved of Spencer’s version. Beyond its technical use the phrase is often used loosely to suggest that the strongest or most ruthless will succeed at the expense of others, though this is a distortion of the original Darwinian notion.