Noun

Singular society

Plural countable and uncountable; plural societies

society (countable and uncountable; plural societies)

1. (countable) A long-standing group of people sharing cultural aspects such as language, dress, norms of behavior and artistic forms.

   This society has been known for centuries for its colorful clothing and tight-knit family structure.

2. (countable) A group of people who meet from time to time to engage in a common interest.

   It was then that they decided to found a society of didgeridoo-playing unicyclists.

3. (countable) The sum total of all voluntary interrelations between individuals.
4. (uncountable) The people of one’s country or community taken as a whole.

   It’s not for society to decide whether I can play the didgeridoo in my own home.

   He thinks that the fact that this child grew up to be a murderer is the fault of society.

5. (uncountable) high society.

   Smith was first introduced into society at the Duchess of Grand Fenwick's annual rose garden party.

   • 1813, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice:

     "What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy! There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished society."

6. (law) A number of people joined by mutual consent to deliberate, determine and act a common goal.

Related terms

• building society
• high society
• Royal Society
• societal
• society function
• society pages

A society is a body of individuals of a species, generally seen as a community or group, that is outlined by the bounds of functional interdependence, comprising also possible characters or conditions such as cultural identity, social solidarity, or eusociality. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture or institutions. Like other groups, a society allows its individual members to achieve individual needs or wishes that they could not fulfill separately by themselves, without the existence of the social group. Society, however, may be unique in that it is ontologically independent of, and utterly irreducible to, the qualities of its constituent individuals. As a reality sui generis, or "of its own kind", it is emergently composed of social facts that often hinder rather than help the pursuits of the subjects that form its physical and psychological underpinnings.

More broadly, a society is an economic, social or industrial infrastructure, made up of a varied multitude of individuals. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups. A society may be a particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation state, such as Bhutan; a broader cultural group, such as a Western society; or even a social organism such as an ant colony.

The word society may also refer to an organized voluntary association of people for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. Sociology is the study of society and social behavior.

Quotes about society.

• "A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god."
  • Aristotle, Politics

• "What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees."
  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

• "Man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection."
  • Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)

• "The history of society is the history of the inventive labors that man alter man, alter his desires, habits, outlook, relationships both to other men and to physical nature, with which man is in perpetual physical and technological metabolism."
  • Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (1978)

• I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
  • Rubén Blades

• Has anyone been out in society recently? Cause its shit!
  • Russel Brand

• "What times! What manners!."
  • Cicero, in Catilinam

• "The only living socities are those which are animated by inequality and injustice."
  • Paul Claudel, Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher

• It is the retention by twentieth-century, Atom-Age men of the Neolithic point of view that says: You stay in your village and I will stay in mine. If your sheep eat our grass we will kill you, or we may kill you anyhow to get all the grass for our own sheep. Anyone who tries to make us change our ways is a witch and we will kill him. Keep out of our village.
  • Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man

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Mon Jul 6 00:43:41 2009