Survival means staying alive despite difficult, dangerous, or threatening conditions. When someone talks about survival, they mean making it through a situation where staying alive is uncertain or threatened.

In nature, survival often means finding food, water, and shelter when resources are scarce. A hiker lost in the wilderness focuses on survival: building a fire for warmth, finding clean water to drink, and creating shelter from the rain. Animals in harsh environments like deserts or the Arctic develop amazing survival skills: camels store water in their bodies, polar bears grow thick fur, and cacti hold moisture in their stems.

The word also describes persevering through any serious hardship. A small business works toward survival during tough economic times. A sports team fights for survival to avoid elimination from a tournament. In these cases, survival means continuing to exist when forces threaten to end something.

Survival skills are practical abilities that help in emergencies: knowing how to start a fire without matches, which plants are safe to eat, or how to signal for help. Survival instinct is the deep, automatic drive all living things have to protect themselves and stay alive.

People often use survival of the fittest to describe how, in nature, organisms best adapted to their environment tend to survive and reproduce.