Other forms: bodies
Your body is all of you: head, arms, legs, everything under your clothes and skin. It is what the doctor examines, what aches after a long walk, what you wash and feed and put to bed.
Body reaches well past that. A body found in the woods is a dead one, and that is the sense the news uses. The body of a car, a plane or a guitar is its main part, the big piece everything else attaches to, and the body of an email is the writing between the greeting and the sign-off. A body of people is an organised group with a job to do: a governing body, a professional body, the student body. A body of something is a large mass of it: a body of water, a body of evidence, a body of work. Body language is what you say without speaking, and to keep body and soul together is to just about survive.
1nounbodyThe whole physical structure of a person or an animal.~43%
“Swimming uses almost every muscle in the body.”
2nouncorpseA dead person.~33%
“The body was found by a dog walker at first light.”
3nounmainThe main part of a thing, apart from its head, limbs, wings or added parts.~11%
“The body of the guitar was cracked but the neck was fine.”
4nounorganisationAn organised group of people with an official purpose.~11%
“A new body was set up to inspect the schools.”
synonyms: organisation, association
5nounlargeA large mass or quantity of something, thought of as one thing.~2%
“There is a growing body of evidence that the drug helps.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
body is a physical structure.
Old English bodiġ meant the trunk of a person, the chest and torso, and by extension a person's height and stature. It came from Proto-West Germanic *bodag, body or trunk, and further back from a Proto-Indo-European root *bʰewdʰ-, meaning to be awake or to observe. Old High German had botah for the same thing. The word that now means the whole of you started out meaning only the middle of you.
Middle English
bodi
English, today
body
Built from
From Middle English bodi. From Middle English body, bodi, bodiȝ, from Old English bodiġ, bodeġ (“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 (“body, corpse, trunk, torso”) (whence swg Bottich (“body, torso”), bar Bottich (“body, torso, carcass; lower part of a shirt or jacket”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA