entity

From the Medieval Latin entitās, from ēns (“being”) (stem: ent-) + -tās (compare essentia), see there for more information.

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɛn.tə.ti/ [-tʰi]
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈɛn.tɪt.i/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: en‧ti‧ty

entity (plural entities)

1. That which has a distinct existence as an individual unit, often used for organizations which have no physical form.
   • 1951 April, D. S. Barrie, “British Railways: A Survey, 1948-1950”, in Railway Magazine, number 600, page 223:

     The organisational and administrative tasks involved in welding the railways into a single entity have also received much publicity.

   • 1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page ix:

     It is also pertinent to note that the current obvious decline in work on holarctic hepatics most surely reflects a current obsession with cataloging and with nomenclature of the organisms—as divorced from their study as living entities.

   • 2014 June 12, George Dvorsky, “12 Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World”, in Gizmodo‎^[1]:

     Weinersmith, who is best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, describes the polystate as a geopolitical entity in which multiple overlapping states exist — but each “state” consists of citizens who have agreed to the laws of a single non-geographic state; typical geographically-bound nations, or traditional “geostates”, would be replaced by “polystates”, which are collections of “anthrostates”.

   • 2024 October 23, Kara Scannell, “Trump Organization intends to create 25 entities for future product or hotel licensing deals, monitor says”, in CNN‎^[2]:

     The monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s finances wrote in its latest report that Donald Trump’s company intends to create 25 new entities for products or hotel licensing deals.

2. The existence of something considered apart from its properties.
3. (databases) Anything about which information or data can be stored in a database; in particular, one item in an organised array or set of individual elements or parts of the same type.
4. The state or quality of being or existence.

   The group successfully maintains its tribal entity.

5. A spirit, ghost, or the like.
   • 1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 231:

     [B]ut only too often séances degenerate into pure sorcery or necromancy, attracting all kinds of undeveloped and earth-bound entities.

6. (science fiction) An alien lifeform that has no corporeal body.

• See also Thesaurus:entity

See more under Hyponyms above.

• ens

• entity on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “entity”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “entity”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• “entity” (US) / “entity” (UK) in Macmillan English Dictionary.
• “entity”, in Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
• “entity”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.

• IPA^(key): [ˈɛntɪtɪ]

entity

1. inflection of entita:
   1. genitive singular
   2. nominative/accusative/vocative plural