Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, or human reasoning about the cosmos.
  • noun Among the Sophists, the topics of rational argument or the arguments themselves.
  • noun In Stoicism, the active, material, rational principle of the cosmos; nous. Identified with God, it is the source of all activity and generation and is the power of reason residing in the human soul.
  • noun In biblical Judaism, the word of God, which itself has creative power and is God's medium of communication with the human race.
  • noun In Hellenistic Judaism, a hypostasis associated with divine wisdom.
  • noun Christianity In Saint John's Gospel, especially in the prologue (1:1–14), the creative word of God, which is itself God and incarnate in Jesus.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In theology, the Divine Word; the transcendent Divine Reason as expressed in a distinct personality; the Second Person in the Trinity, both before and after the incarnation: so called as expressing God both to God himself and to his creatures, as language expresses reason and as reason is expressed by language.
  • noun In the philosophy of Heraclitus and the Stoics, the rational principle that governs and develops the universe.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A word; reason; speech.
  • noun The divine Word; Christ.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the divine word of God; the second person in the Trinity (incarnate in Jesus)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Greek; see leg- in Indo-European roots.]

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word Logos.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.