Other forms: identities
Your identity is who you are — everything that makes you exactly yourself. A sense of identity, national identity, identity crisis.
It runs from the practical to the philosophical. Practically, identity is what documents prove: proof of identity, identity theft, identity card. Socially it means belonging — cultural identity, gender identity. And personally it means the continuous sense of being one person over time, which is what an identity crisis threatens. Note mistaken identity, the legal phrase, and that in mathematics an identity is an equation true for every value.
1nounidentityWho somebody is; what makes them themselves.
“The town lost its whole identity when the works closed.”
2nounproofProof of who somebody is.
“You need two forms of identity to open the account.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
identity is who somebody is.
Late Latin identitas was built from idem, the same, to translate a Greek word meaning sameness. Identity is literally sameness — the quality of being the same thing you were yesterday, which is the whole of the philosophical problem.
Middle French
identité
Middle English
ydemptite
English, today
identity
Built from
From Middle English ydemptite, from Middle French identité. From Middle English ydemptite, from Middle French identité and its etymon LL. idemptitās,identitās, from idem (“the same”) + -tās as a calque of Ancient Greek ταὐτότης (“sameness”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA