soul

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity.
2. n. The spiritual nature of humans, regarded as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.
3. n. The disembodied spirit of a dead human.
4. n. A human: "the homes of some nine hundred souls” ( Garrison Keillor).
5. n. 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).
6. n. A person considered as the perfect embodiment of an intangible quality; a personification: I am the very soul of discretion.
7. n. 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).
8. n. A sense of ethnic pride among Black people and especially African Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion, and music.
9. n. A strong, deeply felt emotion conveyed by a speaker, a performer, or an artist.
10. n. Soul music.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A substantial entity believed to be that in each person which lives, feels, thinks, and wills. Animals also, and even plants, have been thonght to have souls. Primitive peoples identify the soul with the breath, or something contained in the blood. Separated from the body, it is supposed to have some imperfect existence, and to retain the form of the body as a ghost. The verses of Davies (see below) enumerate most of the ancient Greek opinions. The first is that of Anaximander and of Diogenes of Apollonia; the second is that of Heraclitus; the third is that of Empedocles; the fourth is that attributed to Empedocles by Aristotle; the fifth is that of Dicæarchus and other Pythagoreans, as Simmias in the “Phædo”; the sixth is attributed wrongly to Galen; the seventh is that of Democritus and the atomists; the eighth is attributed by some authorities to the Pythagoreans; and the ninth is that of the Stoics. Aristotle makes the soul little more than a faculty or attribute of the body, and he compares it to the “axness” of an ax. The scholastics combined this idea with that of the separability and immortality of the soul, thus forming a highly metaphysical doctrine. Descartes originated distinct metaphysical dualism, which holds that spirit and matter are two radically different kinds of substance—the former characterized by consciousness, the latter by extension. Most modern philosophers hold to monism in some form, which recognizes only one kind of substance. That the soul is immortal is a very ancient and widely diffused opinion; it is also commonly believed that the soul has no parts. A soul separated from the body is commonly called a spirit, not a soul. In biblical and theological usage ‘sour’ (nephesh, psyche, also rendered ‘life’) is sometimes used for the non-corporeal nature of man in general, and sometimes, in distinction from spirit, for the lower part of this non-corporeal nature, standing in direct communication with the body, and regarded as the seat of the emotions, rarely of will or spirit. Some theologians minimize the distinction between soul and spirit, making them mere aspects or relations of the same substance, while others have made them distinct substances or distinct entities.
2. n. The moral and emotional part of man's nature; the seat of the sentiments or feelings: in distinction from intellect.
3. n. The animating or essential part; the essence: as, the soul of a song; the source of action; the chief part; hence, the inspirer or leader of any action or movement: as, the soul of an enterprise; an able commander is the soul of an army.
4. n. Fervor; fire; grandeur of mind, or other noble manifestation of the heart or moral nature.
5. n. A spiritual being; a disembodied spirit; a shade.
6. n. A human being; a person.
7. n. Synonyms and
8. n. Intellect, Spirit, etc. See mind.
9. n. Ardor, force.
10. To endue with a soul.
11. n. Anything eaten with bread; a relish, as butter, cheese, milk, or preserves; that which satisfies.
12. To afford suitable sustenance; satisfy with food; satiate.

Wiktionary

1. n. religion, folklore The spirit or essence of a person usually thought to consist of one's thoughts and personality. Often believed to live on after the person's death.
2. n. The spirit or essence of anything.
3. n. Life, energy, vigor.
4. n. music Soul music.
5. n. A person, especially as one among many.
6. n. An individual life.
7. v. obsolete, transitive To endue with a soul; to furnish with a soul or mind.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. adj. obsolete Sole.
2. v. obsolete To afford suitable sustenance.
3. n. The spiritual, rational, and immortal part in man; that part of man which enables him to think, and which renders him a subject of moral government; -- sometimes, in distinction from the higher nature, or spirit, of man, the so-called animal soul, that is, the seat of life, the sensitive affections and phantasy, exclusive of the voluntary and rational powers; -- sometimes, in distinction from the mind, the moral and emotional part of man's nature, the seat of feeling, in distinction from intellect; -- sometimes, the intellect only; the understanding; the seat of knowledge, as distinguished from feeling. In a more general sense, “an animating, separable, surviving entity, the vehicle of individual personal existence.”
4. n. The seat of real life or vitality; the source of action; the animating or essential part.
5. n. The leader; the inspirer; the moving spirit; the heart.
6. n. Energy; courage; spirit; fervor; affection, or any other noble manifestation of the heart or moral nature; inherent power or goodness.
7. n. A human being; a person; -- a familiar appellation, usually with a qualifying epithet.
8. n. A pure or disembodied spirit.
9. n. A perceived shared community and awareness among African-Americans.
10. n. Soul music.
11. v. obsolete To indue with a soul; to furnish with a soul or mind.
12. adj. By or for African-Americans, or characteristic of their culture.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. deep feeling or emotion
2. n. a secular form of gospel that was a major Black musical genre in the 1960s and 1970s
3. n. the human embodiment of something
4. n. a human being
5. n. the immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life