Soma

How to spell soma

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce soma

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does soma mean?

1. nounThe physical body of an organism, especially as distinct from the mind or from the reproductive cells.
2. nounThe main cell body of a neuron, containing the nucleus, from which the axon and dendrites extend.

Soma in a sentence

• The therapy treats the mind and the soma as a single connected system.

• Each signal travels from the dendrites into the soma of the nerve cell.

• In biology the soma refers to all body cells other than the germ cells.

• The nucleus of the neuron sits within its soma.

Where does soma come from?

Language of origin: Greek

In its main scientific sense the word comes straight from the Greek sōma, meaning simply 'the body', that is, the physical organism as opposed to the mind or spirit. Greek writers used sōma for the living body and later for any material substance, and the root travelled into English mainly through anatomy and medicine, where it still powers familiar relatives such as 'somatic', 'chromosome' (literally 'coloured body'), and 'psychosomatic'. A quite separate strand of the same spelling reached English from Sanskrit soma, the name of a sacred plant and the intoxicating ritual drink pressed from it in the ancient Vedic religion; this is the source Aldous Huxley borrowed when he named the happiness drug in his 1932 novel Brave New World. The two histories converged on one tidy four-letter spelling, which is why the word looks identical whether you mean the human body or the Vedic drink. Because every letter is pronounced and the spelling is so short, the only real difficulty is remembering which heritage you are invoking.

How the word is built

• soma (from Greek sōma: body); no prefix or suffix, the word stands alone as a borrowed root