a survivor: someone who has escaped a deadly danger and gotten away alive
This word names the person who got out. It is built on a family of Hebrew words for being pulled out of danger into safety, and it always points to the same figure: not merely someone running, but someone who has come through a battle, a massacre, or a disaster and lived to stand on the other side of it.
Two shades run through its uses. Sometimes it is a single individual, and often that individual is the one who carries the news: the escapee who reaches Abram to report that Lot has been captured, or the man who arrives from the fallen city to tell Ezekiel that Jerusalem has been struck. At other times it is a whole body of people, the survivors of a nation put to the sword, those still alive once the killing has passed.
In the prophets that second shade grows heavy. The survivors of Israel become a loaded idea: the few who live through catastrophe and carry the people's future with them, a near neighbor of the word for what is left over (שָׂרִיד). Isaiah even stretches it to "the survivors of the nations" invited to turn to God. The plain word for a battlefield escapee becomes, by the end, the language of a rescued people.