Bible
nounThe collection of sacred writings of the Christian religion, comprising the Old and New Testaments.
How to spell bible
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce bible
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does bible mean?
- nounThe collection of sacred writings of the Christian religion, comprising the Old and New Testaments.
- nounA book regarded as the most authoritative or essential reference on a particular subject.
Bible in a sentence
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The hotel room had a bible tucked inside the bedside drawer.
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That worn cookbook is the bible of French home cooking in our kitchen.
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She read a familiar passage from the bible during the morning service.
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Every new engineer on the team treats this manual as their bible.
Where does bible come from?
Language of origin: Greek
The word traces back to the Greek biblion, meaning 'little book' or simply 'book', which was a diminutive of biblos, the word for the papyrus material that books were written on. That material took its name from Byblos, the ancient Phoenician port through which papyrus was traded into Greece. The plural form ta biblia, 'the books', came to mean the sacred writings of Christianity, and this passed into Latin as biblia, treated as a feminine singular noun. From Latin it reached English through Old French around the 1300s, settling as a single word for the collected scriptures. The same Greek root survives in everyday words such as 'bibliography' and 'bibliophile', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the 'bibl' from 'book'.
How the word is built
- bibl- (from Greek biblion: book)
- -e
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