Word.ws English Dictionary

coming to life

coming to life is the present participle and gerund of come to life.

Meaning of come to life

Verb

come to life (third-person singular simple present comes to life, present participle coming to life, simple past came to life, past participle come to life)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To become alive, to be given life; to be brought into existence.
    • We want to know exactly how the first cells came to life on earth.1999, Lee Smolin, New York Times, We All Came From Mars
  2. (idiomatic, intransitive) To appear as if alive.
    • The CGI-generated characters came to life through an incredible display of a cutting-edge 3D technology.
  3. (idiomatic, intransitive) To start to become energetic.
    • It was only after Yakubu sliced another chance into the side netting, a bad miss by the former Everton striker, that Norwich came to life.2011 October 29, Neil Johnston, “Norwich 3 - 3 Blackburn”, in BBC Sport

Questions about coming to life

What is coming to life the present participle and gerund of?
Coming to life is the present participle and gerund of come to life.

Words near coming to life in the dictionary

  1. coming to blows
  2. coming to fruition
  3. coming to grief
  4. coming to grips with
  5. coming to Jesus
  6. coming to life
  7. coming to light
  8. coming to mind
  9. coming to naught
  10. coming to nothing
  11. coming to nought

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coming to life (page history and authors); come to life (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “coming to life.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/coming_to_life. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.