ego: [19] Ego is Latin for ‘I’ (and comes in fact from the same Indo-European base as produced English I). English originally acquired it in the early 19th century as a philosophical term for the ‘conscious self’, and the more familiar modern uses – ‘self-esteem’, or more derogatorily ‘selfimportance’, and the psychologist’s term (taken up by Freud) for the ‘conscious self’ – date from the end of the century.
Derivatives include egoism [18], borrowed from French égoïsme, and egotism [18], perhaps deliberately coined with the t to distinguish it from egoism. And the acquisitions do not end there: alter ego, literally ‘other I, second self’, was borrowed in the 16th century, and the Freudian term superego, ‘beyond I’, entered the language in the 1920s. => i
1714, as a term in metaphysics, "the self; that which feels, acts, or thinks," from Latin ego "I" (cognate with Old English ic; see I). Psychoanalytic (Freudian) sense is from 1894; sense of "conceit" is 1891. Ego-trip first recorded 1969, from trip (n.). Related: egoical; egoity.
In the book of Egoism it is written, Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity. [George Meredith, "The Egoist," 1879]
双语例句
1. She is, first and foremost, her husband's alter ego.
她首先是丈夫的知己。
来自柯林斯例句
2. Barry Humphries's alter ego Dame Edna has taken the US by storm.
巴里·汉弗莱斯凭借埃德娜夫人一角轰动全美。
来自柯林斯例句
3. She was a prisoner of her own ego.
她为自己的自尊心所困。
来自柯林斯例句
4. Superman's alter ego was Clark Kent.
超人的第二自我是克拉克∙肯特。
来自《权威词典》
5. He has the biggest ego of anyone I've ever met.
