morale

Morale is how much heart a group has left in it. Three wins in a row and the dressing room hums; a round of redundancies and the same office goes silent by ten in the morning.

It belongs to groups above all — troops, staff, a team, a class — though one person can have low morale too. The word takes high and low rather than good and bad: morale is high, morale is low, morale plummeted, a morale boost, a morale-boosting win. It has no plural and no article of its own; you talk about the morale of the team, never a morale. Watch two neighbours: moral is about right and wrong, and morals are a person's principles. The stress falls on the second syllable, muh-RAHL, which is where its French past shows.