Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The physical and constitutional characteristics of an individual, especially as related to the tendency to develop a certain disease.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In medicine, characteristic state or condition; constitutional habit.
- n. In natural history, the general appearance or likeness of an animal or a plant, irrespective of its structure; facies.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Zoöl.) Habitude; mode of life; general appearance.
WordNet 3.0
- n. constitution of the human body
- n. person's predisposition to be affected by something (as a disease)
Etymologies
- From Latin habitus ("habit"), from habeō ("have; maintain"). (Wiktionary)
- Latin, condition; see habit. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Council of Trent has refrained from applying the term habitus to sanctifying grace.”
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 6: Fathers of the Church-Gregory XI
“Note 6: My use of the term "orthodox" is not the same as Bourdieu's, embedded in habitus — the social reproduction of structures in a stable society.”
Belongings: Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa
“This collective ethos forms what Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, called the habitus, the coherent amalgam of practices linking habit with inhabitance.”
'I Saw a Nightmare …' Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976
“Saint Thomas Aquinas,4 using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see.”
“The virtue or "habitus" of art, Maritain writes, is not simply an "interior growth of spontaneous life," but has an intellectual character and involves cultivation and practice.”
“I have thought it worthwhile to vary the interpretation of this word, because though "habitus" may be equivalent to all the senses of [Greek: exis], "habit" is not, at least according to our colloquial usage we commonly denote by "habit" a state formed by habituation.”
“Of themselves, such "habitus" give no facility to act, but only the power, the mere potentia.”
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 7: Gregory XII-Infallability
“Just as those young people of Chinese background will have an impact on world culture and that of their places of origins, so will those cosmopolites with no Chinese background who are now making the Chinese world the 'habitus' for their creativity.”
“I considered specifically asking readers not to make hateful comments about the lady herself (and I'm pleased to note that the typical reply is one of "sadness" rather than something derogatory of her body habitus).”
“Sex doesn't matter, frame doesn't matter, muscularity doesn't matter: BMI is the be all and end all of body habitus assessment.”
BMI: Lessons from D&D, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘habitus’.
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bkerr's Words
wyrd, absinthe, homunculus, zorkmid, informon, decider, diachronic, frak, hwæt, feldercarb, yawp, dogfooding and 540 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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andystardust's Words
liminal, soporific, solipsism, calumny, sanguine, egregious, inimical, corpus, divulge, a fortiori, salutary, evanescence and 118 more...
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Lolita
Words compiled while reading Lolita
lolita, solecism, cognomen, etiolate, tendresse, expiatory, filch, paroxysm, arabesques, sibilant, manque, uranist and 181 more...
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random
words I read but don't know
nascent, proxy, desultory, charlatan, churlish, emaciated, gaudy, shill, lurid, frisson, marauding, plunder and 610 more...
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Master
comprehensive
picaresque, carnivalesque, -esque, grotesque, Cocteau, necropolis, hypnopædic, mojito, imprimatur, insouciance, idyll, maestro and 239 more...
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Thesis words
Words that will come in handy for my senior thesis, which I am working on "as we speak."
quiddity, irrupt, metaphor, embodiment, attunement, orientation, comportment, performativity, style, lifestyle, hexis, habitus and 24 more...
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Academese
Jargon and vocabulary used in Academia, especially in cultural studies
intertextuality, hermeneutics, hegemony, problematize, engender, signify, multivocality, paradigm, deconstruction, ethnograpy, praxis, decontextualize and 22 more...
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Academic Terms
heuristic, hegemony, monolithic, nomothetic, phenomenology, habitus, ontology, praxis, hermeneutics, liminal, agency, dialectic and 29 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for habitus.
stephanieconn No, surely not? Habitus is not 'habit", it is:
"a set of acquired patterns of thought, behavior, and taste 1. These patterns, or "dispositions," are the result of internalization of culture or objective social structures through the experience of an individual or group."
May 14, 2008