# self
## English
### Alternative forms

* selfe, silf, silfe (obsolete)

### Etymology

From Middle English self, silf, sulf, from Old English self, seolf, sylf, from Proto-Germanic *selbaz. Cognates include Gothic 𐍃𐌹𐌻𐌱𐌰 (silba), German selbst and Dutch zelf.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /sɛlf/
* (Southern US, African-American Vernacular, dated) IPA: /sɛf/
* Audio (US):(file)
* Rhymes: -ɛlf

### Pronoun

self (selves)
* (obsolete or rare) Himself, herself, itself, themselves; that specific (person mentioned).
    This argument was put forward by the defendant self.
** 1898 July 18, The Leader, Melbourne, page 34, column 1:Now that I put on my glasses I could see that the hut was empty but for our two selves; that it must have been absolutely empty till we entered.
** 2024 August 21, Richard Foster, “Cultivating the growth in leisure travel”, in RAIL, number 1016, page 37:But what unites many of these rural railways is that they are shadows of their former selves.
* (commercial or humorous) Myself.
    I made out a cheque, payable to self, which cheered me up somewhat.

### Noun

self (plural selves or selfs)
* One individual's personality, character, demeanor, or disposition.
** 2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Ch.1, at p.7:
    John Locke argued that the mind is not like a furnished flat, prestocked before occupation with innate ideas, but like a home put together piecemeal from mental acquisitions picked up bit by bit. The self is thus the bit-by-bit product of experience and education: we are what we become - or, in Wordworth's later phrase, the child is the father of the man. Particular parents, surroundings and stimuli produce individuated selves. Identity is thus unique because contingent, the cumulative product of ceaseless occurrences.
* The subject of one's own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts.
** c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ix]:Portia: To these injunctions every one doth swear That comes to hazard for my worthless self.
** 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], →OCLC, page 0056:Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
* An individual person as the object of the person's own reflective consciousness (plural selves).
** 1859–1860, William Hamilton, “Lecture IX”, in H[enry] L[ongueville] Mansel and John Veitch, editors, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC:The self, the I, is recognized in every act of intelligence as the subject to which that act belongs. It is I that perceive, I that imagine, I that remember, I that attend, I that compare, I that feel, I that will, I that am conscious.
** 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XVI, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:The preposterous altruism too! […] Resist not evil. It is an insane immolation of self—as bad intrinsically as fakirs stabbing themselves or anchorites warping their spines in caves scarcely large enough for a fair-sized dog.
* Self-interest or personal advantage.
* Identity or personality.
* (botany) A seedling produced by self-pollination (plural selfs).
* (botany) A flower having its colour uniform as opposed to variegated.
* (molecular biology, immunology) Any molecule, cell, or tissue of an organism's own (belonging to the self), as opposed to a foreign (nonself) molecule, cell, or tissue (for example, infective, allogenic, or xenogenic).
** 2000, G Ristori et al., “Compositional bias and mimicry toward the nonself proteome in immunodominant T cell epitopes of self and nonself antigens”, in FASEB Journal: the official journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, volume 14, number 3, →PMID, pages 431–438:Similarity profiles between helper T cell epitopes (of self or microbial antigens and allergens) and human or microbial SWISSPROT collections were produced. For each antigen, both collections yielded largely overlapping profiles, demonstrating that self-nonself discrimination does not rely on qualitative features that distinguish human from microbial peptides. [...] Epitopes (on self and nonself antigens) can cross-stimulate T cells at increasing potency as their similarity with nonself augments.
** 2013 May-June, Katrina G. Claw, “Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3:In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.

#### Synonyms

* cyberself
* herself
* himself
* itself
* myself
* non-self
* oneself
* one's self
* ourselves
* technoself
* themselves
* thyself
* yourself
* yourselves

#### Antonyms

* (immunology) nonself

#### Derived terms

* note to self
* not-self
* self-abuse
* self-care
* self-centered
* self-contained
* selfdom
* selfhood
* self-hosted
* selfie
* selfish
* selfless
* selflike
* selfly
* selfness
* selfsame
* selfsameness
* selfship

#### Descendants

* → Korean: 셀프 (selpeu)
* Sranan Tongo: srefi

#### See also

* self-
* person
* I
* ego

### Verb

self (third-person singular simple present selfs, present participle selfing, simple past and past participle selfed)
* (botany) To fertilize by the same individual; to self-fertilize or self-pollinate.
* (botany) To fertilize by the same strain; to inbreed.

#### Antonyms

* outcross

### Adjective

self
* Having its own or a single nature or character throughout, as in colour, composition, etc., without addition or change; of the same kind; unmixed.
    a self bow: one made from a single piece of wood
    a self flower or plant: one which is wholly of one colour
* (obsolete) Same, identical.
** c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]:I owe you much, and, like a wilful youth / That which I owe is lost; but if you please / To shoot another arrow that self way / Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt, / As I will watch the aim, or to find both, / Or bring your latter hazard back again, / And thankfully rest debtor for the first.
** c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]:I am made of that self mettle as my sister.
** 1614, Walter Ralegh [i.e., Walter Raleigh], The Historie of the World […], London: […] William Stansby for Walter Burre, […], →OCLC, (please specify |book=1 to 5):But were it granted, yet the heighth of these Mountains is far under the supposed place of Paradise; and on these self Hills the Air is so thin […]
** 1700, [John] Dryden, “Palamon and Arcite: Or, The Knight’s Tale. In Three Books.”, in Fables Ancient and Modern; […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC:At that self moment enters Palamon / The gate of Venus […]
* (obsolete) Belonging to oneself; own.
* (molecular biology, immunology) Of or relating to any molecule, cell, or tissue of an organism's own (belonging to the self), as opposed to a foreign (nonself) molecule, cell, or tissue (for example, infective, allogenic, or xenogenic).
    Antonym: nonself
** 2000, G Ristori et al., “Compositional bias and mimicry toward the nonself proteome in immunodominant T cell epitopes of self and nonself antigens”, in FASEB Journal: the official journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, volume 14, number 3, →PMID, pages 431–438:Similarity profiles between helper T cell epitopes (of self or microbial antigens and allergens) and human or microbial SWISSPROT collections were produced. For each antigen, both collections yielded largely overlapping profiles, demonstrating that self-nonself discrimination does not rely on qualitative features that distinguish human from microbial peptides. However, epitopes whose probability of mimicry with self or nonself prevails are, respectively, tolerated or immunodominant and coexist within the same (auto-)antigen regardless of its self/nonself nature. Epitopes (on self and nonself antigens) can cross-stimulate T cells at increasing potency as their similarity with nonself augments.

#### Derived terms

* selfbow

### References

* ↑ Hall, Joseph Sargent (1942 March 2) “3. The Consonants”, in The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech (American Speech: Reprints and Monographs; 4), New York: King's Crown Press, →DOI, →ISBN, § 2, page 88.

### Further reading

* “self”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
* William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “self”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
* Self in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)
* “self”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

### Anagrams

* FLES, LSFE, elfs

## Danish
### Alternative forms

* self.

### Adverb

self
* (Internet slang) Abbreviation of selvfølgelig (“of course”).

## Maltese
### Etymology

From Arabic سَلَف (salaf).

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /sɛlf/

### Noun

self m
* loan

## Middle English
### Alternative forms

* salve, silf, sulf

### Etymology

Inherited from Old English self, from Proto-West Germanic *selb, from Proto-Germanic *selbaz.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /sɛlf/, /silf/

### Adjective

self
* (the) (very/self) same, (the) aforementioned
* Intensifies the pronoun or noun it follows or precedes; very
* (+genitive) own

#### Descendants

* English: self
* Scots: self, sel

#### References

* “self, adj., n., & pron.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-03-31.

### Pronoun

self
* themself, themselves; a reflexive pronoun
* that, this

#### Descendants

* English: self (obsolete in most pronominal senses)
* Scots: self, sel
* Yola: zil, zill

#### References

* “self, adj., n., & pron.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-03-31.

### Noun

self (plural selfs)
* (the) same thing, (the) aforementioned thing

#### References

* “self, adj., n., & pron.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-03-31.

## Old English
### Alternative forms

* seolf, sylf

### Etymology

From Proto-Germanic *selbaz.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /self/, [seɫf]

### Pronoun

self
* self; oneself, personally
** late 9th century, translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History
    Sē wer meahte unēaðe þurh hine selfne ārīsan oþþe gān.The man could barely get up or walk by himself.
** late 9th century, King Alfred's translation of St. Augustine's Soliloquies
    Nāt iċ nā þȳ hwā Rōme burg timbrede þe iċ hit self ġesāwe, ac for þȳ þe hit man mē sæġde.I don't know who built the city of Rome because I saw it myself, but because somebody told me.

#### Derived terms

* selflīċ

#### Descendants

* Middle English: self, silf, sulf
** English: self
** Scots: self

## Old Saxon
### Alternative forms

* selvo

### Etymology

From Proto-Germanic *selbaz.

### Pronoun

self
* self

#### Descendants

* Low German: sulv