Definition of "persona" []

• A voice or character representing the speaker in a literary work. (noun)
• The characters in a dramatic or literary work. (noun)
• The role that one assumes or displays in public or society; one's public image or personality, as distinguished from the inner self. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The first to use the term persona in a Trinitarian & christological context asserting in Adv."
• "They used, in Latin, the term persona, which means ˜role™ but which was also used by the grammarians to distinguish what we call ˜first person, second person and third person™ pronouns and verb-forms."
• "In a letter to a disciple, Sri Aurobindo wrote that "the very first step in getting out of the ignorance is to accept the fact that this outer consciousness is not one's soul, not oneself, not the real person, but only a temporary formation on the surface .... the outer personality is the person only in the sense of the Latin word persona which meant originally a mask.""