The derivation
De Vaan treats anima as a derivative sitting inside the article on its male counterpart, animus "mind, spirit," and the shared root tells the whole story. Proto-Italic *anamo- "breath, spirit" stands behind both, continuing PIE *h₂enh₁-mo- "breath" — with real cognates outside Latin: Old Irish anim "soul" (gen. sg. anme), Greek ἄνεμος "wind," and Armenian holm "id." (de Vaan, EDL s.v. animus). Anima is simply the feminine breath-noun beside the masculine animus; de Vaan lists it among the word's own derivatives (alongside animal, animalis, exanimis), not as a separate root.
Ernout-Meillet sharpens the semantic pairing the Romans themselves felt. Anima, they write, is "l'équivalent sémantique du gr. ψυχή" — the semantic equivalent of Greek ψυχή (see psychē) — meaning properly "souffle, air," breath, air, then "air en qualité de principe vital, souffle de vie, âme," air as vital principle, breath of life, soul, and finally "âme des morts," the soul of the dead, the breath that has escaped the dying and crossed to the underworld (Ernout-Meillet, DELL s.v. anima, animus). Cicero states the physiology directly: "quae spiritu in pulmones anima ducitur, ea calescit" — the air drawn by breath into the lungs, that grows warm (Cic., N.D. 2.138, cited DELL).
Animus, by contrast, is Latin's semantic equivalent of Greek θυμός (see thūmos): "le principe pensant," the thinking principle, opposed to corpus on one side and to anima on the other. The Romans themselves worked to keep the two apart — Accius: "sapimus animo, fruimur anima; sine animo anima est debilis," we think with the animus, we enjoy life by the anima; without animus the anima is feeble (Acc., Trag. 296, cited DELL). Animus, the higher principle, is grammatically masculine; anima, subordinate to it, is feminine. Yet usage bled the distinction from the start: Sallust uses anima where the older idiom would want animus ("corpus uoluptati, anima oneri fuit," Cat. 2.8), and by the empire spiritus — Latin's calque of Greek πνεῦμα (see pneuma) — began replacing animus itself, a shift Ernout-Meillet trace through Seneca into the language of the Church (DELL s.v. anima, animus). Anima is the one member of the pair that outlived the empire: it is the ancestor of French âme, Italian anima, Spanish alma — animus left no Romance descendant at all.
Root
- PIE *h₂enh₁-mo- "breath" — de Vaan, EDL s.v. animus, with Proto-Italic *anamo-. Cognates: Old Irish anim "soul," Greek ἄνεμος "wind," Armenian holm "wind" (< *h₂enh₁-mo-).
- Ernout-Meillet trace the same dissyllabic root through Sanskrit ániti "he breathes," Gothic uz-anan "to expire," Old Norse andi "soul, spirit," Welsh anadl and Old Irish anál "breath" — the same breath-root that gives Greek ἄνεμος and, by the parallel pattern, stands behind Greek ψυχή/ψύχω exactly as anima stands to the root of breathing (Ernout-Meillet, DELL s.v. anima, animus).
In the corpus
2,069 occurrences across 182 works, and the center of gravity is a single title: Tertullian's own treatise on the soul. De Anima alone carries 422 occurrences — 177 per 10,000 words, the densest concentration of the lemma anywhere in the indexed corpus (Tertullian, De Anima 34, 53, 43; among many). Tertullian's related tracts follow close behind: De Carnis Resurrectione (167), De Carne Christi (84), and De Testimonio Animae — literally "the testimony of the soul" — at 103 per 10,000 words despite its short length. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, arguing the soul's mortality on Epicurean grounds, contributes 109 occurrences (e.g. Lucr. 4.53, on the cor discussed below). The distribution is a portrait of who cared most about anima: not the poets first, but the philosophers and, above all, the Christian apologist defending the resurrection of the flesh against a soul severed from it.
The word's world
Anima names the breath that every living thing — human or beast — shares; it is Latin's least exclusive soul-word, which is exactly why Ernout-Meillet reach for ψυχή as its nearest Greek analogue rather than any of the words for reason or courage. Cicero's clinical description — air drawn into the lungs, warmed, and returned — treats the anima as a physical process before it is anything else, in the spirit of the Stoic and Epicurean physiologies that made breath the visible evidence of life. But the word's afterlife belongs to Tertullian, who wrote an entire treatise defending the anima's reality, unity, and survival against rival philosophical schools — a soul-word pressed into the service of resurrection theology precisely because it was already, in ordinary Latin, the breath that leaves the body at death. Where animus faded from the Romance languages entirely, anima survived into every daughter tongue: the last word standing, in French âme, Italian anima, Spanish alma, for what a human being is when the body has stopped.
Authorities: de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Brill 2008) s.v. animus (p. 43, treating anima as a listed derivative; opened directly from the audited library, the audited library). Ernout & Meillet, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine (4th ed., Klincksieck) s.v. anima, animus (opened directly, the audited library). Lewis & Short entry and corpus figures from the live Logoi corpus record — receipt soul-word-journey-v0. Cross-references: psychē, thūmos, pneuma.