virtue
Forms
- Plural
- virtues
Definitions
1.Accordance with moral principles; conformity of behaviour or thought with the strictures of morality; good moral conduct.
- Without virtue, there is no freedom.
- “Virtue is an inner light that can prevail in every soul.”
- There are a set of religious, or rather moral, writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world.
2.An attribute of a personality (a "personality trait") which predisposes a person to behaviors resulting in human goodness; an admirable quality.
- Some men are modest, and seem to take pains to hide their virtues; and, from a natural distance and reserve in their tempers, scarce suffer their good qualities to be known […].
3.A particular manifestation of moral excellence in a person.
4.The idea of all that is good or excellent (in every sense of those terms) in a human being, collectively instantiated by a varying number of human traits known as "the virtues", the enumeration of which vary by the many virtue systems which have developed within different cultures, religions, and historical periods.
Frequency
Overall
Uncommon· #3614
By learning goal
- Everyday conversation
- Rare
- General reading & writing
- Uncommon
- Academic
- Rare
- Literature
- Rare
Related words
Etymology
From Middle English vertu, virtue, borrowed from Anglo-Norman vertu, virtu, from Latin virtus (“manliness, bravery, worth, moral excellence”), from vir (“man”).
Doublet of vertu.
See virile.
In this sense, displaced Old English cræft, whence Modern English craft.