As has been chronicled here more than once, the current pronunciation of the words “short-lived” and “long-lived” has the second element of the compound {-lived} being uttered as if it were the past tense of the verb live rather than the adjectival form of the word life. The traditional pronunciation [laivd] to rhyme with “thrived” is quickly going by the boards in contemporary speech.

This development is yet another all-too-common example of spelling vanquishing derivational morphology in contemporary American English.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO