Self

How to spell self

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce self

What does self mean?

1. nounA person's essential being, character, or individual identity.

Self in a sentence

• After the long holiday she felt like her old self again.

• The therapy helped him reconnect with his true self.

Where does self come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes straight from Old English self or seolf, meaning 'one's own person' or 'the same', and it is among the oldest words in the language. It traces back to a shared Germanic ancestor, visible in the modern German selbst and the Dutch zelf, all carrying the idea of identity or sameness. For most of its history it worked as an emphasising element, the part that made 'myself' and 'himself' point firmly back at the speaker. Over time it also hardened into a noun standing for the whole essential nature of a person, the inner core that makes someone who they are. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable across the centuries, and the single consonant cluster is exactly why it almost never trips an adult writer, even though it spawns long compounds like 'self-esteem' and 'selfless'.

How the word is built

• self (Old English self/seolf: one's own person, identity)