Bod

How to spell bod

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bod

What does bod mean?

1. nounAn informal word for a person's body, especially their physical build or figure.
2. nounA chiefly British informal term for a person, often in the phrase 'an odd bod'.

Bod in a sentence

• Months at the gym gave him a surprisingly toned bod.

• The new neighbour is a friendly old bod who waters everyone's plants.

• The magazine promised a beach-ready bod in six weeks.

• He was always the odd bod in the office, eating lunch alone at his desk.

Where does bod come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a casual British clipping of the word 'body', which itself comes from the Old English 'bodig', the native Anglo-Saxon term for the physical frame of a person or animal. The longer word has been in continuous English use for well over a thousand years, while the shortened, breezy 'bod' is a much more recent piece of twentieth-century slang. As with many clippings (think 'fab' from 'fabulous' or 'telly' from 'television'), speakers simply lopped off the unstressed ending and kept the punchy opening syllable. In informal British usage it came to mean either a person's physique or, in phrases such as 'an odd bod', the person themselves. The single 'd' is the spelling trap: because the parent word 'body' has only one 'd', the clipping keeps one too, even though the short vowel might tempt a writer to double it.

How the word is built

• bod (clipped form of 'body')