What does heart mean?

What does heart mean?. The world's largest and most trusted free online dictionary: definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more.

What does heart mean? - The Free Dictionary

Search

[n] the locus of feelings and intuitions(in your heart you know it is true her story would melt your bosom)[n] the hollow muscular organ located behind the sternum and between the lungs; its rhythmic contractions move the blood through the body(he stood still, his heart thumping wildly)[n]

heart

heart - The Free Dictionary

[n] the locus of feelings and intuitions
(in your heart you know it is true her story would melt your bosom)

[n] the hollow muscular organ located behind the sternum and between the lungs; its rhythmic contractions move the blood through the body
(he stood still, his heart thumping wildly)

[n] the courage to carry on
(he kept fighting on pure spunk you haven't got the heart for baseball)

[n] an area that is approximately central within some larger region
(it is in the center of town they ran forward into the heart of the struggle they were in the eye of the storm)

[n] the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience
(the gist of the prosecutor's argument the heart and soul of the Republican Party the nub of the story)

[n] an inclination or tendency of a certain kind
(he had a change of heart)

[n] a plane figure with rounded sides curving inward at the top and intersecting at the bottom; conventionally used on playing cards and valentines
(he drew a heart and called it a valentine)

[n] a firm rather dry variety meat (usually beef or veal)
(a five-pound beef heart will serve six)

[n] a positive feeling of liking
(he had trouble expressing the affection he felt the child won everyone's heart the warmness of his welcome made us feel right at home)

[n] a playing card in the major suit that has one or more red hearts on it
(he led the queen of hearts hearts were trumps)

Other vocabulary

'hood, human botfly, human chorionic gonadotrophin, human chorionic gonadotropin, human death, human dynamo, human ecology, human elbow, human face, human foot, human gamma globulin, human genome project, human growth hormone, human head, human immunodeficiency virus, human knee, human language technology, human nature, human palaeontology, human paleontology, human papilloma virus, human process, human race, human relationship, human remains pouch, human reproductive cloning, human right, human t-cell leukemia virus-1, human waste, human-centered, e, e layer, e region, e'en, e'er, e-bomb, e-commerce, e-mail, e-mycin, e. a. von willebrand, e. b. white, e. coli, e. e. cummings, e. g. marshall, e. h. harriman, e. h. weber, e. l. doctorow, e. o. lawrence, e. o. wilson, e. t. a. hoffmann, e. t. s. walton, e. w. morley, e.g., e.s.p., ea, each, each week, each year, eacles, eacles imperialis

Dictionary

A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.

A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed[citation needed] to be semasiological, mapping word to definition, while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological, first identifying concepts and then establishing the terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types. There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual (translation) dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms (thesauri), and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary.

There is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries; the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications (e.g. "informal" or "vulgar") in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive.

The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times around 2300 BCE, in the form of bilingual dictionaries, and the oldest surviving monolingual dictionaries are Chinese dictionaries c. 3rd century BCE. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written in 1604, and monolingual dictionaries in other languages also began appearing in Europe at around this time. The systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest arose as a 20th-century enterprise, called lexicography, and largely initiated by Ladislav Zgusta. The birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, with the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of having an "astonishing" lack of method and critical-self reflection.