Chastity
sexual conduct of a person that is deemed praiseworthy and virtuous
Chastity, also known as purity, is a virtue related to temperance. Someone who is chaste refrains from sexual activity that is considered immoral or from any sexual activity, according to their state of life. In some contexts, for example when making a vow of chastity, chastity means celibacy.
Etymology
The words chaste and chastity stem from the Latin adjective castus ("cut off", "separated", "pure"). The words entered the English language around the middle of the 13th century. Chaste meant "virtuous", "pure from unlawful sexual intercourse" or (from the early 14th century on) as a noun, a virgin, while chastity meant "(sexual) purity".
Thomas Aquinas links castus (chastity) to the Latin verb castigo ("chastise, reprimand, correct"), with a reference to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: "Chastity takes its name from the fact that reason 'chastises' concupiscence, which, like a child, needs curbing, as the Philosopher states".
In Abrahamic religions
For many Orthodox Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Bahá’í people should restrict their acts of a sexual nature to the context of marriage. For unmarried people, chastity is equivalent to sexual abstinence. Sexual acts outside of or apart from marriage, such as adultery, fornication, masturbation, and prostitution, are considered immoral due to lust.
The public source identifies “Chastity” as sexual conduct of a person that is deemed praiseworthy and virtuous. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chastity, sexual and conduct.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q207894. The Library of Congress control number is sh85022733. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chastity” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.