soul
(s
l)
KEY
NOUN:
- The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity.
- The spiritual nature of humans, regarded as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.
- The disembodied spirit of a dead human.
- A human:
"the homes of some nine hundred souls"
(Garrison Keillor).
- The central or integral part; the vital core:
"It saddens me that this network ... may lose its soul, which is after all the quest for news"
(Marvin Kalb).
- A person considered as the perfect embodiment of an intangible quality; a personification:
I am the very soul of discretion.
- A person's emotional or moral nature:
"An actor is ... often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not"
(Alec Guinness).
- A sense of ethnic pride among Black people and especially African Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion, and music.
- A strong, deeply felt emotion conveyed by a speaker, a performer, or an artist.
- Soul music.
ETYMOLOGY:
Middle English, from Old English
s
wol
