soul
(sōl)
[Middle English, from Old English sāwol.]
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.
