Id

How to spell id

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce id

What does id mean?

1. nounIn Freudian theory, the part of the unconscious mind that holds basic instinctual drives and seeks immediate gratification.

Id in a sentence

• The lecturer explained how the id demands instant pleasure without regard for consequences.

• Psychoanalytic theory places the ego between the id and the outside world.

Where does id come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This little word comes straight from Latin id, which simply means 'it'. In the early twentieth century Sigmund Freud described a part of the unconscious mind in German as das Es, literally 'the it', meaning the raw, instinctual drives that operate beneath conscious awareness. When his work was translated into English, the translators reached for Latin rather than plain English, rendering das Es as id to give it a clinical, scholarly weight. The word entered English psychology in the 1920s and has stayed in that technical sense ever since. Its tiny size makes it deceptively easy to mistype, and writers sometimes confuse the lowercase psychological term with the capitalised abbreviation ID for identification, which is a completely separate word.

How the word is built

• id (Latin: 'it', a whole word borrowed unchanged)