means The act of staying alive or continuing to exist through danger, hardship, or difficulty.

from From the Latin supervivere, a marriage of super- ('over, beyond') and vivere ('to live') — literally to 'over-live,' to outlast. It came into English through French survivre, and for centuries 'survive' carried the quiet sense of outliving someone else; 'survival' as the noun for the bare fact of enduring is the later harvest of that long Latin root.