heart

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“

Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul.

—VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol VI No 2

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American Heritage Dictionary (39)

noun Anatomy The chambered muscular organ in vertebrates that pumps blood received from the veins into the arteries, thereby maintaining the flow of blood through the entire circulatory system.
noun Anatomy A similarly functioning structure in invertebrates.
noun The area that is the approximate location of the heart in the body; the breast.

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Century Dictionary (68)

The principal organ of the circulation of the blood in man and other animals; the physiological center of the blood-vascular system. It is a hollow muscular or otherwise contractile organ which receives blood in its interior, and by contractions or pulsations drives it out again, and thus keeps up the circulation of this fluid. In its simplest form, as in the early embryo of a vertebrate and in many invertebrate animals, it is simply an expanded part or expansion in the course of a blood-vessel, capable of beating, pulsating, or alternately dilating and contracting, and so acting upon the contained fluid mechanically. (See cuts under Astacidæ and Balanoglossus.) In the process of development one or both orifices of this bulb are furnished with a valve permitting the flow of blood in one direction and preventing it in the other; and the bulb is partly divided by a constriction across it, one of the resulting parts being specially devoted to the reception of blood, as from a vein, and its transmission only into the other part, which then by contraction urges it onward, as into an artery. This is the structure of the two-chambered or bilocular heart of the lower vertebrates, in which the receiving-chamber is the auricle, the distributing-chamber is the ventricle, and the communication between them is the auriculoventricular opening. In a more complex form the bilocular heart is partly divided into right and left halves by a constriction or partition which separates the single auricle into two, the result being the three-chambered or trilocular heart, in which one auricle, the right, receives venous blood from the body at large, the left auricle receives aërated or arterial blood from gills or lungs, and each auricle pours its blood through its own auriculoventricular orifice into a common and single ventricle, which then sends a current of mixed venous and arterial blood to all parts of the body. Such is the type of the reptilian heart; though the right and left auricles are in fact incompletely separated from each other, retaining an interauricular opening, which in the embryos of birds and mammals is known as the foramen ovale. Finally, the entire separation of the auricles, and complete division of a common ventricular cavity into a right and a left ventricle by an interventricular septum or partition, result in the perfectly four-chambered or quadrilocular heart of all adult vertebrates above reptiles. Here the right and left sides of the heart, each consisting of an auricle and a ventricle, are entirely separate, so that no mixture of venous and arterial currents is possible. (See circulation of the blood, under circulation.) The ventricles are larger and more muscular than the auricles, since the former have to drive the blood through the body, while the auricles have only to inject it into the ventricles. All the orifices of the heart are more or less completely guarded by sets of valves. The right auriculoventricular valves are called tricuspid; the left, mitral: in both cases from their form in the human heart, in which three membranous valves on the right side and two on the left are operated by delicate fibrous cords (the chordæ tendineæ) and certain muscular processes from the ventricular walls (the columnæ carneæ). The orifices of the aorta and of the pulmonary artery are alike guarded by three crescentic valves, called, from their shape, the semilunar valves. The orifices by which veins enter either auricle either are or are not provided with valves, in different cases, or in different animals. The contraction of the muscular walls of the heart as a whole, or of any one of its chambers, is the systole; the corresponding and alternating dilatation of its cavities, or any one of them, is the diastole; the two movements together complete a cardiac cycle. In vertebrates the heart is situated in the thorax, between the lungs, and enveloped in a serous membrane, the pericardium, which is generally a closed sac with one layer, the visceral or cardiac pericardium, or epicardium, investing the whole surface of the organ and the roots of the great vessels which spring from it, and the other, the parietal layer, reflected over the surface of adjacent structures. The primitive position of the heart is always median; but in the course of its development from the embryo it generally becomes tilted over to one side, the left, as is usual in the higher vertebrates, where the point or apex of the organ lies considerably to the left, and the whole organ becomes unsymmetrical both in its own shape and in its relative position. In general the form of the heart is conoidal, with the base (the auricles) upward or forward, and the apex (the ventricles) downward or backward and sinistral. In man the heart is about 5 inches long, 3½ inches in greatest width, and 2 inches in greatest depth; it weighs 10 or 12 ounces in the male, and 8 or 10 in the female. It lies obliquely in the chest, with its broad fixed base uppermost, a little backward and to the right; its free apex downward, forward, and to the left, so that its beating may be seen or felt at a point an inch or less to the inner side of, and about an inch and a half below, the left nipple, between the fifth and sixth ribs. All the cavities of the heart are lined with a thin smooth membrane, the endocardium, which also invests the valves and is directly continuous with the lining of all the vessels which enter or leave the heart. Its substance, the myocardium, is almost entirely muscular; the muscle is a peculiar striated one, of a deep-red color; its fibers are intricately disposed in two sets, auricular and ventricular, separated by fibrous rings which surround the auriculoventricular orifices. It is supplied with blood for its own nourishment by the right and left coronary arteries, the first branches of the aorta; they are accompanied by cardiac veins. Its nerves are derived from the cardiac plexuses, formed by the pneumogastric and sympathetic nerves. Its action is involuntary. In all other mammals, and in birds, the heart is substantially the same as in man, with differences in relative size, in shape, and in the detail of its openings and valves; but in the acranial vertebrates, the lancelets, it is rudimentary. See also cuts under circulation, embryo, lung, and thorax. At his herte he saw a knif For to reuen him hise lif. Havelok, l. 479. Why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Shak., Macbeth, i. 3.
The human heart or breast considered as the seat of all or of some of the mental faculties; hence, in common figurative use, these faculties themselves. The emotions and affections, especially moral capacity or disposition, as for love or hatred, benevolence or malevolence, pity or scorn, courage or fear, faith or distrust, etc. Men clepen it Mount Joye; for it zevethe joye to Pilgrymes hertes, be cause that there men seen first Jerusalem. Mandeville, Travels, p. 94. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. Isa. i. 5. All offences, my lord, come from the heart; never came any from mine that might offend your majesty. Shak., Hen. V., iv. 8. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. Tennyson, Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
The intellectual faculties; especially, inmost or most private thought; innermost opinions or convictions; genuine or intense desire or sentiment: as, she despised him in her heart; the heart of a man is unsearchable; the devices of the heart; to set one's heart upon something. Merlin thought wele in his herte that so sholde it not go. Merlin (E. E. T. S.), iii. 609. What his heart thinks his tongue speaks. Shak., Much Ado, iii. 2.

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Examples

Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul. — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol VI No 2
He gives Chomsky his due (a "messianic figure") but his heart is with Quirk's Grammar of Contemporary English (a "clinical and compendious work"). — VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XII No 2
The man was so weak! and yet he had hurt it as nothing else in its short life. — The Legacy of Heorot
âTake me to Washington as soon as my heart is all right, introduce me to President Roosevelt, and let me shake hands with him.â — A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After
For his heart was all the while — The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln

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soul · spirit · eye · feel · child · blood · part · word

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (3)

American Heritage Dictionary (1)

Middle English hert, from Old English heorte; see kerd- in Indo-European roots.

Century Dictionary (2)

Early modern English also hart, harte; from Middle English hart, harte, herte, from Anglo-Saxon heorte (genitive heortan), feminine, = Old Saxon herta = OFries. herte, hirte = Old Dutch herte, hert, Dutch hart = Middle Low German herte, Low German hert = Old High German herza, Middle High German herze, German herz (genitive herzens), neuter, = Icelandic hjarta = Swedish hjerta = Danish hjerte = Gothic (Moesogothic) hairtō (genitive hairtōns), feminine, = Irish cridhe = Gaelic cridhe, cri, heart, = Welsh craidd, center, = Cornish kreiz = Breton kreizen = Latin cor (cord-), neuter, = Greek καρδία, also κραδία, feminine, also κῆρ, neuter, = Old Bulgarian srŭdĭtse, Bulgarian srŭdtse = Slov. Servian srdtse = Bohemian srdtce = Polish serce (sertse) = Russian serdtse, heart; possibly = Sanskrit çrad, trust, connected with L. credere, trust (see under credit); the Sanskrit hrid, hridaya, heart, shows a discordant initial. From the L. form cor (cord-) are ult. English cordate, core, courage, etc., accord, concord, discord, record, etc., and from the Greek καρδία ult. English cardiac, cardialgia, etc., pericardium, etc.
from Middle English herten; from heart, n. Cf. hearten. Cf. courage, v., encourage, ult. from Latin cor = English heart.

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