personal identity
noun
Simple meaning
The criteria for the persistence of persons over time, and the criteria for the individuation of persons from others.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
pursihnihlydentuhteeSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈpɝsɪnɪlaɪdɛntəti
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
philosophy
The criteria for the persistence of persons over time (i.e. what makes one the same person as one was yesterday, or ten years ago), and the criteria for the individuation of persons from others.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The criteria for the persistence of persons over time (i.e. what makes one the same person as one was yesterday, or ten years ago), and the criteria for the individuation of persons from others.
Used this way, personal identity is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in academic writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Academic writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.