self
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /sɛlf/
note: Southern US, African-American Vernacular, dated
ipa: /sɛf/
ipa: /sɛl/
rhymes: -ɛlf
Forms: form: selves
form: selfs
form: selfe
form: silf
form: silfe
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.
Senses: examples: text: She remained her usual cheerful self despite recent setbacks
text: 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.
ref: 2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Ch.1, at p.7
glosses: One individual's personality, character, demeanor, or disposition.
examples: text: Portia:
To these injunctions every one doth swear
That comes to hazard for my worthless self.
ref: 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]:
text: 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.
ref: 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:
glosses: The subject of one's own experience of phenomena: perception, emotions, thoughts.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 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:
text: 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.
ref: 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XVI, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
glosses: An individual person as the object of the person's own reflective consciousness (plural selves).
glosses: Self-interest or personal advantage.
topics: biology
botany
natural-sciences
glosses: A seedling produced by self-pollination (plural selfs).
topics: biology
botany
natural-sciences
glosses: A flower having its colour uniform as opposed to variegated.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 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:
text: 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.
ref: 2013 May-June, Katrina G. Claw, “Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3:
topics: immunology
medicine
sciences
qualifier: molecular biology
glosses: 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).
Synonyms: cyberself
herself
himself
itself
myself
non-self
oneself
one's self
ourselves
technoself
themselves
thyself
yourself
yourselves
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
shadow of one's former self
Related terms: self-
person
I
ego