Other forms: torsos
Your torso is the main block of your body: chest, back, belly, hips — everything left when you take away the head, the arms and the legs. It is the part a T-shirt covers.
Doctors and trainers reach for torso because it names exactly that block: a torso injury, twist your torso, keep your torso upright. In art the word narrows — a statue with no head and no limbs is called a torso, and museums are full of them. Trunk does the same job in everyday English, though trunk also belongs to trees and elephants. Torso is not a polite word for the stomach and not another word for the waist; it is the whole middle section, front and back. The plural is torsos.
1nountorsoThe main part of the human body, without the head, arms and legs.
“He was thrown forward and his torso hit the wheel.”
synonyms: trunk
2nounsculptureA sculpture of a body that has no head and no limbs.
“The museum's Greek torso is missing both arms and its head.”
torso is a part of the body.
Also accepted in games: trunk
Torso came from Italian torso, and behind that stand Latin tursus and thyrsus, from the Ancient Greek thyrsos — the staff carried in the rites of Bacchus. That staff was a stalk with everything stripped off it, which is not a bad description of a body with no head, arms or legs.
Latin
tursus
Italian
torso
English, today
torso
From Italian torso, from Latin tursus, from Latin thyrsus, from Ancient Greek θύρσος (“Bacchic staff”). a doublet of thyrse and thyrsus and torse.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Body & Health, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 17 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word