Bookish means fond of reading, and rather removed from ordinary life. A bookish child, bookish and quiet, bookish interests.
It is affectionate and faintly critical at once, since the removed part is doing real work. Of language it means stiff and learned from print rather than from speech, which is a common problem for anybody who learned a language from books.
1adjectivebookishFond of reading, and rather removed from ordinary life.
“A bookish child, she preferred staying in the library to playing football.”
bookish is a quality.
Middle English
bok
English
book
English, today
bookish
From book + -ish. book comes from Middle English bok. From Middle English bok, book, from Old English bōc, from Proto-West Germanic bōk, from Proto-Germanic bōks. Bookmaker sense by a clipping of. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA