A society or a human society is: (1) a group of people related to each other through persistent relations; (2) a large social grouping that shares the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations.

The term society came from the Latin word societas, which in turn was derived from the noun socius ("comrade, friend, ally"; adjectival form socialis) thus used to describe a bond or interaction among parties that are friendly, or at least civil. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals sharing a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. Without an article, the term refers either to the entirety of humanity or to a contextually specific subset of people. In social sciences, a society invariably entails social stratification and/or dominance hierarchy.

Used in the sense of an association, a society is a body of individuals outlined by the bounds of functional interdependence, possibly comprising characteristics such as national or cultural identity, social solidarity, language, or hierarchical organization.

Like other groupings, a society allows its members to achieve needs or wishes they could not fulfill alone. The social fact can be identified, understood, or specified within a circumstance that certain resources, objectives, requirements, or results are needed and utilized in an individual manner and for individual ends, although they cannot be achieved, gotten, or fulfilled in an individual manner as well, but, on the contrary, they can be gotten only in a collective, collaborative manner; namely, teamwork becomes the valid functional means to individual ends which an individual would need to have but is not able to get. This way the social concerns or "interests" (the initial and prior achievement of the global goals at the society level) and the individual ("private") interests (the subsequent achievement of the individual goals) are logically different and not mutually exclusive facets and phases to consider within the social fact. Individual members need to work for the global success of the society (coordinately and organizedly, following certain rules), as a means of working for their own individual success. Society is essentially a collaborative manner of operating to accomplish individual ends (given the circumstances where it needs to be so), this process involving some form of transposition, correlation or resolution between the society-level achievements and the individual-level achievements. In the natural environment, society has been evolved as a successful ethological strategy, very specially and remarkably in the case of Homo sapiens species.

More broadly, a society is an economic, social, or industrial infrastructure, made up of a varied collection of individuals. Members of a society may be from different ethnic groups. A society may be a particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation state, such as Bhutan; or a broader cultural group, such as a Western society. The word society may also refer to an organized voluntary association of people for religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other purposes. A "society" may even, though more by means of metaphor, refer to a social organism such as an ant colony or any cooperative aggregate such as, for example, in some formulations of artificial intelligence.

Quotes about society.

• Activism (989)
• Advice (46)
• Crime (1,500)
• Death (2,063)
• Disabled (827)
• Economics@ (2,351)
• Education@ (39,477)
• Ethnicity (4,766)
• Folklore (874)
• Future (281)
• Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual (2,714)
• Genealogy (5,247)
• Government (2,131)
• History (9,502)
• Holidays (1,660)
• Issues (17,586)
• Language and Linguistics@ (4,466)
• Law (19,571)
• Lifestyle Choices (556)

• Men@ (306)
• Military (1,886)
• Organizations (12,582)
• Paranormal (1,793)
• People (13,634)
• Philanthropy (2,787)
• Philosophy (5,398)
• Politics (2,660)
• Relationships (2,951)
• Religion and Spirituality (95,816)
• Sexuality (427)
• Social Sciences@ (19,769)
• Subcultures (1,023)
• Support Groups (165)
• Transgendered (714)
• Urban Legends@ (55)
• Women@ (2,225)
• Work (496)

• Usenet soc.misc - news: - Google Groups