self – English noun declension

English noun forms of self

Noun: self
Singularself
Pluralselves; selfs

Sample Sentences

  • She remained her usual cheerful self despite recent setbacks
  • 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. [2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Ch.1, at p.7]
  • Portia:
  • To these injunctions every one doth swear
  • That comes to hazard for my worthless self. [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]:]
  • 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. [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:]
  • 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. [a. 1857, 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, published 1859–1860, →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. [1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XVI, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:]
  • 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. [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:]
  • 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. [2013 May-June, Katrina G. Claw, “Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3:]

Etymology

1. From Middle English salve, self, silf, from Old English self, seolf, sylf, from Proto-Germanic *selbaz, from Proto-Indo-European *selbʰ- (“one's own”).
2. Cognates
3. Cognates with Saterland Frisian sälven, säärm, sääuwen (“oneself”), West Frisian sels (“oneself”), Bavarian söbe (“identical, same”), söber (“self”), Dutch zelf (“myself, oneself”), German selber (“self”), selbst (“by oneself”), Luxembourgish selwer (“self”), Yiddish זעלב (zelb, “same”), Danish selv (“self”), Elfdalian siuov (“self”), Faroese sjálvur (“self”), Icelandic sjálfur (“self”), Norwegian Bokmål selv, Norwegian Nynorsk sjølv, Swedish själv (“self”), Gothic 𐍃𐌹𐌻𐌱𐌰 (silba, “self”). See: Middle English Nouns 'salve', Dutch Nouns 'zelf', Danish Nouns 'selv', Faroese Nouns 'sjálvur', Icelandic Nouns 'sjálfur', Norwegian Nynorsk Nouns 'sjølv', Swedish Nouns 'själv'.

Verbs referencing "self"

Dutch Nouns zelf, Danish Nouns selv, English Nouns selca.