entity

noun

1. That which has a distinct existence as an individual unit, often used for organizations which have no physical form.

   “The organisational and administrative tasks involved in welding the railways into a single entity have also received much publicity.”

   “It is also pertinent to note that the current obvious decline in work on holarctic hepatics most surely reflects a current obsession with cataloging and with nomenclature of the organisms—as divorced from their study as living entities.”

   “Weinersmith, who is best known for his webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, describes the polystate as a geopolitical entity in which multiple overlapping states exist — but each “state” consists of citizens who have agreed to the laws of a single non-geographic state; typical geographically-bound nations, or traditional “geostates”, would be replaced by “polystates”, which are collections of “anthrostates”.”

   “The monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s finances wrote in its latest report that Donald Trump’s company intends to create 25 new entities for products or hotel licensing deals.”

2. The existence of something considered apart from its properties.
3. Anything about which information or data can be stored in a database; in particular, one item in an organised array or set of individual elements or parts of the same type.
4. The state or quality of being or existence.

   “The group successfully maintains its tribal entity.”

5. A spirit, ghost, or the like.

   “[B]ut only too often séances degenerate into pure sorcery or necromancy, attracting all kinds of undeveloped and earth-bound entities.”

6. An alien lifeform that has no corporeal body.