Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

bookish

UK/ˈbʊkɪʃ/US/ˈbʊkɪʃ/
adjectiveB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,997 of 15,258neutral

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.

Definitions of bookish

  1. 1adjectivebookishFond of reading, and rather removed from ordinary life.B2+

    “A bookish child, she preferred staying in the library to playing football.”

bookish is a quality.

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    bok

  2. English

    book

  3. 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

Practise this word

bookish in the wild

  • Brownlow is a bookish and kindly middle-aged bachelor who helps Oliver escape the clutches of Fagin, and later adopts him.

    Mr Brownlow

  • Lance was a bookish, paranoid boy, with a kind heart and keen wit.

    Lance Wilkinson

  • BookTube videos also generally follow a set of formats, often drawing upon the wider "bookish" culture and lexicon.

    BookTube

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • book
  • booklet