Bodily

How to spell bodily

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce bodily

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bodily mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the physical body rather than the mind or spirit.
2. adverbAs a whole physical body; with the entire body at once.

Bodily in a sentence

• adjective

  The assault charge specified grievous bodily harm.

• adverb

  Two stewards lifted the protester bodily from the chamber.

• adjective

  The clinic monitors the bodily functions of every patient overnight.

• adverb

  The wind nearly knocked him bodily off the narrow ledge.

Where does bodily come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on 'body', which descends from the Old English 'bodig', a word that meant the trunk or main frame of a person or animal and had no exact equivalent in the other Germanic languages, making its deeper origin something of a puzzle. To that native noun English added the familiar suffix '-ly' (Old English '-lic', meaning 'having the qualities of'), producing an adjective recorded from around the 1200s with the sense 'belonging to the body'. The same suffix soon let the word work as an adverb too, describing something done to the whole physical frame at once, as when a person is carried 'bodily' from a room. Because the silent letter in the suffix collapses 'body' plus '-ly' into a single 'i', writers sometimes hesitate over the spelling, but it follows the regular rule of changing a final 'y' to 'i' before the ending. The root 'body' still anchors the meaning firmly to physical, flesh-and-blood existence.

How the word is built

• bod (from Old English bodig: body, trunk)
• -ily (adjective/adverb suffix, from -ly)