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''principle'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260124202223-00-⌔

principle - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

principle (plural principles)

  • A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief.
    • ✤ Synonym: premise
    • ✤ We need some sort of principles to reason from.
    • ✤ Let us consider ‘my dog is asleep on the floor’ again. Frege thinks that this sentence can be analyzed in various different ways. Instead of treating it as expressing the application of __ is asleep on the floor to my dog, we can think of it as expressing the application of the concept
      my dog is asleep on __
      to the object
      the floor
      (see Frege 1919). Frege recognizes what is now a commonplace in the logical analysis of natural language. We can attribute more than one logical form to a single sentence. Let us call this the principle of multiple analyses. Frege does not claim that the principle always holds, but as we shall see, modern type theory does claim this.      1
  • A rule used to choose among solutions to a problem.
    • ✤ The principle of least privilege holds that a process should only receive the permissions it needs.
    • ✤ Mr. Genachowski proposed codifying the new principles with four existing principles issued several years ago by the F.C.C. They say that network operators cannot prevent users from accessing lawful Internet content, applications and services of their choice, nor can they prohibit users from attaching nonharmful devices to the network.2
  • (sometimes pluralized) Moral rule or aspect.
    • ✤ Synonyms: tenet, value
    • ✤ I don’t doubt your principles.
    • ✤ You are clearly a person of principle.
    • ✤ It’s the principle of the thing; I won’t do business with someone I can’t trust.
    • ✤ Lavinia—shrewd, careless, clever; ready to meet any difficulty, however humiliating, that might occur; utterly without principle; confident in that good fortune, which she scrupled at no means of attaining—was the very type of the real.3
  • (physics) A rule or law of nature, or the basic idea on how the laws of nature are applied.
    • ✤ *Bernoulli’s principle *
    • ✤ The Pauli Exclusion Principle prevents two fermions from occupying the same state.
    • ✤ The principle of the internal combustion engine
    • ✤ Some poems, echoing the purpose of early poetic treatises on scientific principles, attempt to elucidate the mathematical concepts that underlie prime numbers. Others play with primes’ cultural associations. Still others derive their structure from mathematical patterns involving primes.4
  • A fundamental essence, particularly one producing a given quality.
    • ✤ Many believe that life is the result of some vital principle.
    • A chemical compound within plant or animal tissue that is characteristic of it and more or less peculiar to it, such that it defines the character of that tissue from a human viewpoint (as for example nicotine in tobacco).
      • ✤ *the active principle *
      • ✤ Cathartine is the bitter, purgative principle of senna.5
  • A source, or origin; that from which anything proceeds; fundamental substance or energy; primordial substance; ultimate element, or cause.
    • ✤ The soul of man is an active principle.6
  • An original faculty or endowment.
    • ✤ those active principles whose direct and ultimate object is the communication either of enjoyment or suffering7
  • Misspelling of principal.
  • (obsolete) A beginning.
    • ✤ Doubting sad end of principle unsound.8

Verb

principle (third-person singular simple present principles, present participle principling, simple past and past participle principled)

  • (transitive) To equip with principles; to establish, or fix, in certain principles; to impress with any tenet or rule of conduct.
    • ✤ Let an enthusiast be principled that he or his teacher is inspired.9

Etymology

From Middle English principle, from Old French principe, from Latin prīncipium (“beginning, foundation”), from prīnceps (“first”). By surface analysis, prīmus (“first”) +‎ -ceps (“catcher”); the former ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ﹡preh₂- (“before”); see also prince.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, General American, Canada, Australian) IPA: /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/, [ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pɫ̩],/ˈpɹɪn.sə.pəl/, [ˈpɹɪn.sə.pɫ̩]
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Homophone: principal
  • Hyphenation: prin‧ci‧ple

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 2011 July 20, Edwin Mares, “Propositional Functions”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ‎, archived from the original on 15 December 2012: ↩

  2. 2009 September 22, Reuters, “F.C.C. Calls Open Internet Rules Vital”, in The New York Times ‎, archived from the original on 9 November 2020: ↩

  3. 1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Author and the Actress”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 105: ↩

  4. 2013 July-August, Sarah Glaz, “Ode to Prime Numbers”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 4: ↩

  5. 1845, William Gregory, Outlines of Chemistry: ↩

  6. 1664, John Tillotson, “Sermon I. The Wisdom of Being Religious. Job XXVIII. 28.”, in The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: […], London: […] B. Aylmer, […]; [a] nd W. Rogers, […], published 1696, →OCLC: ↩

  7. 1828, Dugald Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man: ↩

  8. 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book V, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 2: ↩

  9. 1689 (indicated as 1690), [John Locke], chapter 4, in An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. […], London: […] Eliz[abeth] Holt, for Thomas Basset, […], →OCLC, book I, page 20: ↩

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