Bodies

How to spell bodies

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bodies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bodies mean?

1. nounMore than one body: the physical frames of people or animals, or organised groups, masses, or main parts.

Bodies in a sentence

• The gym was full of people working on their bodies.

• Several professional bodies regulate accountants in the country.

Where does bodies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'body', which comes from the Old English word 'bodig', meaning the trunk or main frame of a person or animal. The origin is purely Germanic, yet curiously it has no clear surviving relatives in the other Germanic languages, which makes its deeper ancestry something of a puzzle. Over the centuries the meaning widened from the physical trunk to the whole living frame, then onward to a corpse, a group of people acting together (as in a 'governing body'), and even to a main mass of anything, such as the body of a letter. The spelling trap appears only in the plural: English regularly turns a final consonant-plus-y into '-ies', so 'body' becomes 'bodies', not 'bodys'. Because the everyday plural is so familiar, writers rarely err here, but the rule that converts y to i is the feature worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• bod- (from Old English bodig: trunk, frame)
• -y (noun)
• plural -ies (y becomes i before -es)