Identity
WordNet
noun
(1) The distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity
"You can lose your identity when you join the army"
(2) Exact sameness
"They shared an identity of interests"
(3) The individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognized or known
"Geneticists only recently discovered the identity of the gene that causes it"
"It was too dark to determine his identity"
"She guessed the identity of his lover"
(4) An operator that leaves unchanged the element on which it operates
"The identity under numerical multiplication is 1"
WiktionaryText
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Vulgar Latin < < . See and .
Noun
- The sameness some individuals share to make up the same kind or universal.
- The difference or character that marks off an individual from the rest of the same kind.
- A name or persona—the mask or appearance one presents to the world—by which one is known.
- This criminal has taken on several identities
- Knowledge of who one is.
- I've been through so many changes, I have no sense of identity.
- This nation has a strong identity.
- Any function which maps all elements of its domain to themselves.
- An element of an algebraic structure which, when applied to another element under an operation in that structure, yields this, second element.
Related terms
- identic
- identical
- identification
- identify