bodies

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of body.

   The forensic team examined the bodies recovered from the river.

   Astronomers catalog thousands of small bodies orbiting beyond Neptune.

   Note

   The final -y of body becomes -ies, the regular pattern after a consonant, and the same spelling also serves as the verb's present-tense form. The plural carries whichever meaning of body is in play: living organisms whose arteries thicken with age, corpses recovered from a river, or simply people counted one by one. Only the context tells these readings apart, because the form itself never changes.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of body.

   The cathedral bodies forth the faith of the people who built it.

   Each chapter bodies forth the author's argument in vivid, concrete detail.

   Note

   Two very different registers share this form. In literary use it usually pairs with forth, as when a cathedral bodies forth a faith, giving an abstract thing a visible shape. In slang it is blunt and transitive: it means to murder someone or, more loosely, to defeat them utterly. The surrounding words make the register plain, so the same verb rarely causes confusion in context.

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