Bodied

How to spell bodied

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bodied

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bodied mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a body or physical substance of a specified kind, usually used in compounds such as able-bodied or full-bodied.

Bodied in a sentence

• The medical confirmed that every recruit was fully able-bodied before training began.

• She recommended a rich, full-bodied red wine to match the beef.

Where does bodied come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built directly on body, which comes from the Old English bodig, a term that meant the trunk or main frame of a person or animal. The deeper roots of bodig are obscure; it has no clear cousins in the other Germanic languages, which is unusual and makes its earlier history genuinely uncertain. By the medieval period body had broadened to mean the whole physical person, and English speakers added the adjective ending -y, then -ied, to describe something as having a body of a particular kind. The spelling trap lives in that ending: because body ends in a consonant plus -y, the y flips to i before the suffix, giving bodied rather than bodyed. The form is now most familiar inside compounds such as able-bodied and full-bodied, where it carries the sense of being equipped with, or possessing, a body or substance of a stated type.

How the word is built

• body (from Old English bodig: trunk, frame)
• -ied (adjective suffix; the -y of body changes to -ied)