thing
noun
Thing — the plainest word for anything that holds together as itself
Definition
A separate and self-contained entity
In depth
A thing is whatever can be set apart from everything else and considered on its own — a deliberately humble word, stripped of the philosophical machinery that surrounds 'entity' or 'object.' Its very plainness gives it power: 'thing' can name what is too strange, too vast, or too unclassifiable for any more precise term.
Origin
The word's history is older and stranger than its plainness suggests: in Old English and across the Germanic languages, 'thing' originally meant an assembly or a matter brought before a council for judgment, the root surviving today in Iceland's parliament, the Althing. Only gradually did the word drift from 'a matter under discussion' to 'any object whatsoever,' carrying a faint residue of its old sense that something becomes a 'thing' once it has been singled out for attention.
Usage examples
"There was a thing in the attic that none of them could name, only describe."
"Love, he decided, was not a feeling but a thing — solid, heavy, carried."
"What is this thing we call the self, she asked, if it changes completely every seven years?"
How to use it
Thing is endlessly versatile precisely because it commits to nothing — it can describe the concrete or the abstract, the named or the unnameable. Skilled writers exploit this vagueness deliberately, using 'thing' to suggest mystery or magnitude that a more specific noun would foreclose.
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