Embodies

How to spell embodies

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce embodies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does embodies mean?

1. verbRepresents or expresses an idea, quality, or feeling in a tangible or visible form.

Embodies in a sentence

• The new headquarters embodies the company's commitment to clean energy.

• She embodies everything a good manager should be: calm, fair, and decisive.

Where does embodies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present-tense third-person form of the verb 'embody', which was assembled in English itself rather than borrowed whole. The core is the native Old English word 'bodig', meaning the physical trunk or frame of a person, a word whose deeper origins are obscure and which curiously has no close cousins in the other Germanic languages. To this was added the prefix 'em-', a form of 'en-' that came through Old French from the Latin 'in', carrying the sense of 'to put into' or 'to make'. Joined together in the late 1500s, 'embody' first meant literally 'to give a bodily form to', and from there it broadened to its common modern sense of representing an idea or quality in concrete, visible form. The spelling trap lies in the ending: the base 'embody' ends in a consonant plus 'y', so the 'y' turns to 'i' before the suffix, giving 'embodies' rather than 'embodys'.

How the word is built

• em- (variant of en-: to put into, to make)
• body (from Old English bodig: trunk, physical frame)
• -ies (third-person singular present ending)