Etimology
From Middle English bodi, bodiȝ, from Old English bodiġ (“body, trunk, chest, torso, height, stature”), from Proto-West Germanic *bodag (“body, trunk”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰewdʰ- (“to be awake, observe”). Cognate with Old High German botah (whence Swabian Bottich (“body, torso”)).
noun
body (countable and uncountable, plural bodies)
Physical frame.
Main section.
Coherent group.
Material entity.
(printing) The shank of a type, or the depth of the shank (by which the size is indicated).
(geometry) A three-dimensional object, such as a cube or cone.
Examples
I saw them walking from a distance, their bodies strangely angular in the dawn light.
If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body?And if the eare shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body: is it therefore not of the body?If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?But now hath God set the members, euery one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.And if they were all one member, where were the body?But now are they many members, yet but one body.
The body is driven by desires, but the soul is at peace.
Her body was found at four o'clock, just two hours after the murder.
Indeed, if it belonged to a poor body, it would be another thing; but so great a lady, to be sure, can never want it […]
Sometime I've set right down and eat WITH him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing.
“Well,” I says, “I cal'late a body could get used to Tophet if he stayed there long enough.” ¶ She flared up; the least mite of a slam at Doctor Wool was enough to set her going.
What's a body gotta do to get a drink around here?
This, of course, was not about the State, but it was certainly an invasion: black bodies acting out in a public domain circumscribed by a racist culture. The Garvey movement presents an example of black bodies transgressing racialized spatial boundaries.
In doing so, Haritaworn also rethinks the marginality of transgender bodies and practices in queer movements and spaces.
As the title suggests, this project is particularly interested in how race intersects with reproductive technologies—how brown bodies are deployed in the creation of white babies.
The boxer took a blow to the body.
The bumpers and front tyres were ruined, but the body of the car was in remarkable shape.
Penny was in the scullery, pressing the body of her new dress.
A bodysuit. [from 19th c.]
In many programming languages, the method body is enclosed in braces.
I was escorted from the building by a body of armed security guards.
The local train operating company is the managing body for this section of track.
We have now amassed a body of evidence which points to one conclusion.
All bodies are held together by internal forces.
The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded.
We have given body to what was just a vague idea.
"I'd Be Lost Without You" seems somewhat out of place from a vocal viewpoint — Lewis's slightly reedy middle soprano is very expressive and absolutely true, but doesn't have enough dark body to fully deal with the torchy melody.
The red wine, sadly, lacked body.
In a gentle breeze, the whole body of air, as far as the breeze extends, moves at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour; in a high wind, at the rate of seventy, eighty, or an hundred miles an hour […]
Using three-dimensional seismic and well data from the northern North Sea, we describe a large body of sand and interpret it as extrusive.
The huge body of ice is in the southeastern edge of a Central Asian region called the Third Pole.
The English Channel is a body of water lying between Great Britain and France.
a nonpareil face on an agate body
The stemless notes could have been cast on a body as short as 4 mm but were probably cast on bodies of the standard 14 mm size for ease of composition.
Related words
synonyms
See also Thesaurus:body
See also Thesaurus:corpse
verb
body (third-person singular simple present bodies, present participle bodying, simple past and past participle bodied)
(transitive, often with forth) To give body or shape to something.
To construct the bodywork of a car.
(transitive) To embody.
(transitive, slang, African-American Vernacular) To murder someone.
Examples
And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.
[A]s you stand on the steps of the Castle Green in this strange place, you feel quite floaty. This you are told is the scene of the Merthyr riots; and you feel still floatier as you body forth before your eyes a picture like the following— […]
The drama of the storehouse on earth has its counterpart in Heaven, and if we accept the insights of both Jacobsen and von Dechend, we can see that the myth is bodying forth a principle which will later be expressed in the Hermetic axiom, "As above, so below." In fact, it is precisely this relationship between above and below that the myth explores.
I don't say, one bodies the other / One's spiritual truth; / But I do say it's hard to lose either, / When you have both.
I keep getting bodied by kids half my age.