torso
/ˈtɔːsəʊ
/noun (plural torsos or US also torsi /ˈtɔːsiː/)
1The trunk of the human body.The royal family are shown with elongated skulls and pear-shaped bodies with skinny torsos and arms but fuller hips, stomachs and thighs....
- Cross your arms over your chest, squeeze your glutes and slowly raise your torso until your body forms a straight line.
- Any time you do dips you're working your whole torso, your upper trunk and your arms at the same time.
1.1The trunk of a statue without, or considered independently of, the head and limbs.Casts have also been made of other parts of the human body, for instance, limbs or torsos, for use as models by sculptors who work in stone or other materials....
- The quiet square evokes the classical arcades and statuary of antiquity (the sculpture is a torso of Aphrodite).
- Bronze idol of Ganapathi, with finely proportioned torsos and exquisitely designed limbs is a cynosure of all eyes.
1.2An unfinished or mutilated thing, especially a work of art or literature: the Requiem torso was preceded by the cantata
Origin
Late 18th century: from Italian, literally 'stalk, stump', from Latin thyrsus (see thyrsus).
Like bust, torso at first described sculpture, referring to the trunk of a statue without the head and limbs. Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend (1865), was one of the first to apply it to the living human body, writing of a man with ‘too much torso in his waistcoat’. The word itself came from Italian, where it originally meant ‘a stalk or stump’.