To excite means to make someone feel eager, energetic, or enthusiastic about something. When your teacher announces a field trip to the science museum, that news might excite the whole class. When you unwrap a birthday present you've been hoping for, you feel excited. The feeling of excitement is that bubbly, can't-sit-still energy that comes when something good is about to happen or is happening right now.

Scientists also use excite to describe what happens when you add energy to atoms or molecules. When you excite atoms by heating them or shining light on them, they absorb that energy and move to a higher energy state. This is why neon signs glow: electricity excites the gas atoms inside the tubes, and they release that energy as colorful light. In your own body, nerve cells get excited when they receive signals, allowing messages to travel from your brain to your muscles.

Whether describing a kid excited about recess or an atom excited by energy, the word captures that state of heightened activity and energy, that moment when something moves from calm to active, from ordinary to charged.