liver
noun · adjective
Form of live , comparative of live.
Simple meaning
A large organ in the body that stores and metabolizes nutrients, destroys toxins and produces bile.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
liverSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈlɪvɚ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
anatomy
A large organ in the body that stores and metabolizes nutrients, destroys toxins and produces bile. It is responsible for thousands of biochemical reactions.
A dark brown colour, tinted with red and gray, like the colour of liver.
countableuncountable
This organ, as taken from animals used as food.
Someone who is alive: one of the living.
Someone who lives in a particular place; an inhabitant, a dweller.
adjective
Of the colour of liver (dark brown, tinted with red and gray).
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A2 · Elementary (estimated)
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A large organ in the body that stores and metabolizes nutrients, destroys toxins and produces bile. It is responsible for thousands of biochemical reactions.
Used this way, liver is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Medicine/healthcare
- Science
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use liver
- “I'd like some goose liver pate.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Uniform worn by some menservants and chauffeurs.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Sausage containing ground liver.
A type of skin disease that causes brown spots on the skin.
A brown-spotted dalmatian.
Malignant neoplastic disease of the liver usually occurring as a metastasis from another cancer.
A solid dark brown horse.
A disease affecting the liver.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.