a survivor: the one left alive, or the little left over, after everyone and everything else has been destroyed.
This word names the one who is left when the rest are gone. It belongs to scenes of destruction: a battle, a massacre, the fall of a city, a household wiped out. Whoever or whatever comes through alive when everything around it is destroyed is the survivor.
Its most striking feature is that it usually appears in the negative. Again and again the conquest stories close with the same grim tally: the attacker "left no survivor." The word's job in those lines is not to celebrate someone who made it, but to say that no one did. So even though "survivor" sounds hopeful in English, in most of its occurrences the point is total, deliberate slaughter.
In the prophets the word takes on a heavier weight. When God brings judgment, the survivor is the one He does or does not leave. Sometimes the warning is that none will be left at all; other times a small band of survivors is exactly the hope, the seed of a people God will grow again. Here the plain battlefield word edges toward the language of the faithful remnant, close to שְׁאֵרִית, and stands beside the fugitive who escapes, פָּלִיט, with whom it is often paired.
The poetry of Job stretches the word one step further, using it for what is left of a person's estate: surviving children, or the last scraps of a rich man's goods once ruin has burned through his tent.