body

noun

1. (countable)Physical frame.

   “I saw them walking from a distance, their bodies strangely angular in the dawn light.”

   “Lizzo, who is known for messages of self-love and wider acceptance, has recently said as much as she shared that she is encouraging a stance of body neutrality for herself and others. […] “Everyone’s bodies change,” she said. “That’s life, that’s what the human existence is.””

2. (countable, uncountable)Physical frame.

   “The body is driven by desires, but the soul is at peace.”

3. (countable)Physical frame.

   “Her body was found at four o’clock, just two hours after the murder.”

   “The bodies of 19-year-old best friends Holly Bowles and Bianca Jones were returned to Australia on Tuesday night.”

4. (countable, uncountable)Physical frame.

   “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.”

   “Cobb Belcher's downstairs. He wants to buy you a beer. Says a body who can whip his brother Dell must be a body worth knowing.”

   “What’s a body gotta do to get a drink around here?”

5. (countable, uncountable)Physical frame.

   “the early modern English husband not only took control over his wife's property upon marriage, he also acquired property in her body.”

   “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.”

6. (countable, uncountable)Main section.

   “(countable) A bodysuit. [from 19th c.]”

7. (countable, uncountable)Main section.

   “The boxer took a blow to the body.”

8. (countable, uncountable)Main section.

   “The bumpers and front tyres were ruined, but the body of the car was in remarkable shape.”

   “The railless vehicles have been supplied by the Railless Electric Traction Company, of London, as contractors, to the joint specification of the general managers of the Leeds and Bradford Tramways. The bodies have all been constructed by Messrs. Hurst, Nelson and Company, of Motherwell.”

9. (archaic, countable, uncountable)Main section.

   “Penny was in the scullery, pressing the body of her new dress.”

10. (countable, uncountable)Main section.
11. (countable, uncountable)Main section.

    “In many programming languages, the method body is enclosed in braces.”

12. (countable, uncountable)Main section.
13. (countable, uncountable)Coherent group.

    “I was escorted from the building by a body of armed security guards.”

14. (countable, uncountable)Coherent group.

    “The local train operating company is the managing body for this section of track.”

15. (countable, uncountable)Coherent group.

    “We have now amassed a body of evidence which points to one conclusion.”

16. (countable)Material entity.

    “All bodies are held together by internal forces.”

17. (uncountable)Material entity.

    “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.”

18. (uncountable)Material entity.

    “The red wine, sadly, lacked body.”

    “"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.”

19. (countable, uncountable)Material entity.

    “The English Channel is a body of water lying between Great Britain and France.”

    “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 (10 km³) 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.”

20. (countable, uncountable)The shank of a type, or the depth of the shank (by which the size is indicated).

    “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.”

21. (countable, uncountable)A three-dimensional object, such as a cube or cone.

verb

1. (often, transitive)To give body or shape to something.

   “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.”

2. To construct the bodywork of a car.
3. (transitive)To embody.

   “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.”

4. (slang, transitive)To murder someone.
5. (broadly, slang, transitive)To murder someone.

   “I keep getting bodied by kids half my age.”

name

1. A surname transferred from the nickname.
2. (archaic)Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.