Guna

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An element or quality that influences character and behavior
2. a term in philosophy and psychology used to categorize human traits and tendencies
3. a concept from Indian tradition indicating essential qualities of nature that govern existence

Etymology: The English "guna" comes straight from Sanskrit "guṇa," a word whose earliest sense was "quality" or "strand," and which is also the basis of ordinary words for "good qualities" and "virtue" in Hindu thought. Its philosophical weight comes from the Sankhya school, where the three guṇas are the basic qualities that make up all of nature and mind, and human temperament is understood as their varying mixture. This is the sense English borrowed for philosophy and psychology, where the term is used to classify traits and tendencies. The shift from a plain word for a quality to a technical category is a change of scale rather than of meaning. In Sanskrit the word could describe any attribute of a thing, and the Sankhya thinkers gave it a fixed, numbered set of meanings. When the term passed into modern English scholarship, it kept that idea of basic, classifiable qualities, now applied to human character rather than to the cosmos.

Synonyms: quality, attribute, property, characteristic

Antonyms: defect, flaw