relive

To relive something means to experience it again in some way—to reexperience it.

Sometimes, relive means to vividly recall the experience in your mind, as if you’re living through it again.

In this way, to relive is really to remember. Often, saying that you relived an event really means that a memory of it triggered the same emotions you felt during the original experience.

Sometimes, we relive experiences in our dreams, and sometimes in flashbacks. When this happens, the mind recreates the experience from our memories.

In movies like Groundhog Day, characters literally relive the same day over and over again—they repeat it again and again until Andie MacDowell falls in love with them.

The meanings of relive and reminisce can overlap. When you reminisce about past events, it’s often an intentional way of trying to relive them.

Reminiscing is commonly done through talking about those events with other people who also experienced them, which can stir memories and emotions.

But there are differences. Reminisce is always used in the context of fond memories, and reminiscing is always intentional, while relive can be used in positive contexts (fond memories) or negative ones (traumatic memories), and reliving an experience in your mind sometimes happens even when you don’t want it to.

Like many other words that begin with the prefix re- (meaning “again”), relive is typically spelled without a hyphen.

In some words that begin with the prefix re-, a hyphen is necessary to distinguish one word from another that would be spelled the same but has an entirely different meaning, such as resign (as in quit) and re-sign (as in sign again). This is not an issue with relive.