Bodyguard

How to spell bodyguard

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce bodyguard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bodyguard mean?

1. nounA person employed to protect another from physical harm.

Bodyguard in a sentence

• The visiting diplomat travelled everywhere with an armed bodyguard.

• The singer hired a former soldier as her bodyguard for the world tour.

Where does bodyguard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound formed from two ordinary words, 'body' and 'guard'. 'Body' comes from the Old English 'bodig', meaning the physical frame of a person, while 'guard' arrived later through Old French 'garde', from a Germanic root meaning 'to watch over' or 'to protect'. The compound dates to around the early 1700s, where 'body' carried the older sense of a person's actual living self rather than merely the trunk. So a bodyguard is literally someone who guards the body, that is, the person. Because both halves are familiar everyday words joined without any spelling change, the only mild trap is remembering to write it as one solid word rather than two or hyphenated.

How the word is built

• body (the person being protected)
• guard (one who watches over)