Other forms: souls
The soul is the part of a person believed to outlast the body. An immortal soul, save his soul, body and soul.
It is a religious and philosophical idea rather than an observable thing, and traditions differ enormously about what it is and what happens to it. In ordinary use, soul means deep feeling: put your soul into it, a performance with no soul. A soul also means a person: not a soul in sight, about four hundred souls. And soul is a music genre. Note soulful, soulless, and soul-searching.
1nounsoulThe part of a person believed to outlast the body.~86%
“Four traditions disagree entirely about what the soul is.”
2noundeepDeep feeling, or a person.~14%
“She sang with real soul, and the audience was moved to tears.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 7 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
soul is an inner self or person.
Old English sawol is Germanic and its deeper origin is unknown — one theory links it to the sea, from a belief that souls came from and returned to water. Nothing confirms it and nothing has replaced it.
Proto-Germanic
*saiwalō — soul
Proto-West Germanic
*saiwalu
Old English
sāwol — soul, life, spirit, being
Middle English
soule
English, today
soul
From Middle English soule, sowle, saule, sawle, from Old English sāwol (“soul, life, spirit, being”), from Proto-West Germanic saiwalu, from Proto-Germanic saiwalō (“soul”), of an uncertain ultimate origin (see there for further information). 2 Cognate with Scots saul, sowel (“soul”), stq Seele (“soul”), West Frisian siel (“soul”), gsw Seel (“soul”), gmw-cfr Siel (“soul”), Dutch ziel (“soul”), German Seele (“soul”), German Low German Seel (“soul”), lb Séil (“soul, spirit”), wym zejł, zəjł, zyił (“soul”), Gothic 𐍃𐌰𐌹𐍅𐌰𐌻𐌰 (“soul”). Scandinavian homonyms seem to have been borrowed from Old Saxon sēola. Modern Danish sjæl (“soul”), Icelandic sál (“soul”), Norwegian Bokmål sjel (“soul”), Norwegian Nynorsk sjel, sål (“soul”), Swedish själ (“soul”), Finnish sielu (“soul”) may have come from Old English sāwol.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA