soul

The English word soul comes from Old English sāwol, also written sáwel and sawol. It is recorded in Anglo-Saxon religious writing by the 800s. That form belongs to a wider Germanic family that includes Old Saxon sêola and Old High German sêula. From the start, the word named the living inner self, not the body.

Behind Old English stands Proto-Germanic saiwalō, the reconstructed common ancestor of these forms. A close early witness appears in Gothic saiwala, translated by Bishop Wulfila in the 4th century. That evidence shows the word was already established across the Germanic world before English was written down. Its deeper pre-Germanic origin is uncertain, and no single Indo-European source has been proved.

In Christian England, sāwol became central in sermons, psalms, and biblical translation. The word narrowed and deepened as it met Latin anima and Greek psychē in theology. By the 1100s and 1200s, Middle English texts usually wrote soule. Sound change and French-influenced spelling helped move the form toward modern soul.

Modern English kept both the old religious sense and broader human ones. Soul can mean the immortal self, a person's deepest feeling, or the emotional force in music and art. Soul music took the word into a new cultural field in the United States in the 1960s. Across all these uses, the old idea of inward life still holds.