body

Unlike most roots in this collection, body is not Latin or Greek — it is native English, from Old English bodig, which first meant just the 'trunk' or torso, the main mass of a person or animal, not counting the head and limbs. Over the Middle English period it widened to mean the whole physical person, and then a corpse, and then almost anything with a solid form or main mass.

That widening is why body works on so many levels at once:

- the literal physical sense: the human body, a body of water, the body of a car, a heavenly body (a planet or star)
- the 'main mass' sense: the body of a letter, the body of evidence — the bulk, the substance
- the 'group as one' sense: a governing body, a body of people — many treated as a single unit

As a building block, body joins easily with prefixes and other words:

- anti- (against) + body gives antibody: a protein the body builds to fight invaders — a defender against foreign 'bodies'
- em- (to put into) + body gives embody: to give bodily form to something abstract — a person embodies an idea
- embody + -ment gives embodiment: the living, physical form an idea takes
- every + body gives everybody: literally 'every person' (body = person, the Middle English sense alive in somebody, nobody, anybody)

Notice the quiet logic in -body words for people. Once body could mean 'a person,' English built a whole set of pronouns from it: somebody, nobody, anybody, everybody. Each is just 'some/no/any/every person.' And embody captures the deepest move of the root: taking something with no shape at all — courage, evil, an era — and giving it a body to live in.