Word.ws English Dictionary

spiritus mundi

spiritus mundi noun: the spirit, outlook, point of view, or social and cultural values characteristic of an era of human history.

Noun

spiritus mundi

  1. (capitalized, sometimes) The spirit, outlook, point of view, or social and cultural values characteristic of an era of human history.
    • . . . a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
      Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
      A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
      A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
      Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
      Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.1919, William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
    • Judson House was bohemian in the broadest sense of that term: a working or living space through much of the 20th century for people alienated from middle-class values, artistic, political, and spiritual. . . . "More than a building, it's the spiritus mundi," says senior minister Peter Laarman.2000 July 25, C. Carr, “Bringing Down the House”, in Village Voice, retrieved 13 Mar 2012

Synonyms of spiritus mundi

Origin of spiritus mundi

Unadapted borrowing from Latin spīritus mundī (literally “spirit of the world”).

Questions about spiritus mundi

What does spiritus mundi mean?
Spiritus mundi means the spirit, outlook, point of view, or social and cultural values characteristic of an era of human history.
What part of speech is spiritus mundi?
Spiritus mundi is a noun.

Words near spiritus mundi in the dictionary

  1. spiritus
  2. spiritus asper
  3. spiritus aspers
  4. spiritus fumans
  5. spiritus lenis
  6. spiritus mundi
  7. spiritus rector
  8. spirituses
  9. spiritweed
  10. spiritwise
  11. Spiritwood

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spiritus mundi (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.

Last updated:

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