Word.ws English Dictionary

habitus

/ˈhæ.bɪ.təs/

habitus noun: habitude; mode of life; bearing.

habitus: habitude; mode of life; bearing
Image: Teresa Bonacci, Antonio Mazzei, Jakub Horák, Pietro, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

habitus (usually uncountable, plural habiti or habitus or habituses)

  1. (usually) Habitude; mode of life; bearing.
  2. (usually, chiefly invertebrates) General appearance.
    • [M]any species having eschariform zoaria in quiet water are able to assume the membraniporiform habitus in strongly agitated water.1963, Alan H. Cheetham, Late Eocene Zoogeography of the Eastern Gulf Coast Region, page 30
  3. (usually) habit
  4. (usually) the general shape and appearance of the body, usually with reference to weight, adipose distribution, posture, and gait; most often called by the collocation body habitus.
  5. (usually) The lifestyle, values, dispositions and expectations of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.
    • A wrestler could gain the rank of ōzeki based on his competitive achievements, but the promotion to yokozuna implied the presence of a certain habitus than embodied the quintessential traditional Japaneseness.2019, Raúl Sánchez García, “Reformulation, expansion, and hybridisation of Japanese martial arts”, in The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts (Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and...
  6. (usually) The liturgical clothing of monks, nuns and the clerical community, metaphorically referring to the religious mode of life.

Forms of habitus

pluralhabiti
pluralhabitus
pluralhabituses

Plural of habitus: habiti or habitus

Origin of habitus

From Latin habitus (“habit”), from habeō (“have; maintain”). The plural habiti is a misconstruction, as the Latin plural is in fact habitūs. habiti may have been influenced by Latin habitī, the plural of the participle habitus; however, it is not the etymon of the English term.

Words formed from habitus

Questions about habitus

What does habitus mean?
Habitus means habitude; mode of life; bearing.
What part of speech is habitus?
Habitus is a noun.
How do you pronounce habitus?
Habitus is pronounced /ˈhæ.bɪ.təs/.
What is the plural of habitus?
The plural of habitus is habiti.

Words near habitus in the dictionary

  1. habitudinal
  2. habitue
  3. habituee
  4. habituees
  5. habitues
  6. habitus
  7. habituses
  8. habitué
  9. habitués
  10. hable
  11. Hables

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: habitus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “habitus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/habitus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.