# entity

Pronunciation: say "EN-ti-tee" /ˈɛn.tɪ.ti/

## Noun

1. Something that has a distinct existence as an individual unit, especially an organization or body that has no physical form.
   - Simple: Something that exists on its own as a single unit, like a company or group.
   - _The merger combined two separate entities into a single corporation._
   - _For tax purposes, the trust is regarded as an independent entity._
2. A being thought to exist without a physical body, such as a spirit or ghost, or an alien of pure energy in science fiction.
   - Simple: A being without a body, such as a ghost or spirit, or a strange alien in a story.
   - _Paranormal investigators claimed to have recorded an unknown entity in the basement._
   - _The medium insisted that several entities were present in the room._
3. Anything about which information can be stored in a database; especially, one item in an organized set of elements of the same type.
   - Simple: Anything that information can be stored about in a database, such as a person or product.
   - _The data model defines a customer entity with name, address, and account fields._
   - _The database treats each customer as a separate entity, storing their name, address, and order history in one record._
4. In philosophy, existence or being, especially the bare fact that something exists, apart from its qualities.
   - Simple: In philosophy, the plain fact that something exists, apart from what it is like.
5. In HTML or XML, a brief coded sequence, such as &, used in place of a special character or a stretch of text.
   - Simple: In web page code, a short code that stands for a special character, such as the & sign, or for some text.
   - _The feed broke because one headline had a bare ampersand instead of the & entity._
   - _Writing < and > as entities keeps the browser from treating them as tags._

## Origin

From Medieval Latin entitās, formed from ēns ("being," with stem ent-) plus the suffix -tās (compare essentia).

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/entity (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).