principles

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of principle.

   The committee debated the principles behind the new policy for hours.

   Several core principles of physics underlie the entire experiment.

   Note

   One spelling serves every meaning of the noun, so context has to sort them. A person's principles are moral rules. A science's principles are its laws of nature or its guiding assumptions. The principles of a plant or animal tissue are the compounds that give it its character, as nicotine does tobacco. The same letters also spell the verb's present-tense form, which plays a different role in the sentence.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of principle.

   Note

   Behind this form is a transitive verb, so someone is always on the receiving end: a school principles its pupils, a parent principles a child. Its construction is to fix someone in a set of beliefs, with in introducing them. It is easy to misread as the plural of the noun. The verb has a singular subject before it and the person instructed after it.

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