- so|ci|e|ty
- so|ci|e|ty «suh SY uh tee», noun, plural -ties, adjective.–n.1. a group of persons joined together for a common purpose or by a common interest. A club, a fraternity, a lodge, or an association may be called a society: »
a debating society, a legal society.
Abbr: Soc.2. a) all the people; human beings living together as a group: »Society must work hard for world peace. The good of society demands that all wrongdoing be punished. Gun-control and drug-control laws are enacted for the good of society.
b) the people of any particular time or place: »American society, twentieth-century society. No political society can be, nor subsist without having in itself the power to preserve the property…of all those of that society (John Locke). A culture is the way of life of a people; while a society is the organized aggregate of individuals who follow a given way of life (Melville J. Herskovits).
c) those people thought of as a group because of common economic position, similar interest or vocation, or other form of similarity in identification: »in cultivated society; the lower, middle, or upper classes of society.
d) their activities and customs: »Magic plays an important part in primitive society.
3. company; companionship: »I enjoy his society. The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door (Emily Dickinson).
4. fashionable people or their doings: »high society, the cafésociety, to be excluded from society. Her mother is a leader of local society.
SYNONYM(S): elite.5. a) an organized community of animals or insects: »a society of wasps.
b) an assemblage of plants of the same species forming a unit in an ecological community.6. U.S. the corporation in Congregational churches that administers the church property, employs the minister, and superintends other church business.–adj.of, having to do with, or belonging to fashionable or socially prominent people: »society gossip, a society debutante.
»The wedding was social history rather than society-page fare (Time).
Useful english dictionary. 2012.
