This site © 2007 by the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Rafał Molencki
University of Silesia , Katowice, Poland
Email: molencki at us dot edu dot pl
The etymology of the noun body is unclear, as there are no close cognates in other Germanic languages, except for Old High German botah (‘corpse’) and perhaps Old Norse buþkr (‘box’). Old English bodig mostly referred to ‘trunk, torso’, the usual word for modern ‘body’ being lic (cf. Ælfric’s Glossary: corpus lic...truncus heafodleas bodi). Middle English witnessed the rapid semantic extension of bodi to the prototypical modern sense, the ‘flesh’ and the corpse, including some new abstract and metaphoric uses (organism, organisation, prominent part of something). One of the new senses that appeared in the 13th century was that of ‘person, personality’, as in He was a swiþe noble kni3t…þe best bodi in ani lond. This later gave rise to the pronominal uses, where the noun lost its original semantic content and came to mean ‘person, one’, as in Also yf a body be oute of his witt. The word came to be used in a number of idiomatic expressions (bodi for bodi, with bodi and god, etc.).
One of the Middle English uses of bodi was emphatic, as in the reflexive form my-body (competing with my-self), e.g. My body y take þe here, to selle To sum man as yn bondage. The construction is the source of indefinite pronouns anybody, somebody, everybody, nobody, many-body, which also coexisted with other similar pronominal forms (everyone, everyman, everywight, etc.). The grammaticalization of the originally complex phrases down to a univerbated pronoun is clear: every a body>every body>every-body>everybody. The process appears to have been complete by the end of the Middle English period.
The study is based on the data gathered chiefly from Oxford English Dictionary, Middle English Dictionary and Middle English Compendium.