Ba

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. In ancient Egyptian religion, the personality or spirit that a person was thought to possess after death and could travel freely
2. The aspect of a person's essence in ancient Egyptian belief, often pictured as a bird with a human head that moved between the tomb and the afterlife
3. A spiritual force in ancient Egyptian thought representing the character and vital identity of an individual, which lived on beyond death

Etymology: Infants produce the syllable "ba" long before they can talk, and parents have long taken it as a sign that the child is calling for them. That babbled sound is the word's most familiar use, though it names a noise rather than anything in the world. A second, unrelated sense comes from Chinese. The Mandarin particle 吧 is a sentence-final marker that softens a statement or turns it into a suggestion. English borrowed the syllable for this grammatical role, and it appears mainly in discussions of Chinese grammar. Separately, in ancient Egyptian belief, the ba was one aspect of a person's being, usually pictured as a bird with a human head that could leave the body after death.