body forth


Also found in: Thesaurus.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Verb1.body forth - represent in bodily form; "He embodies all that is evil wrong with the system"; "The painting substantiates the feelings of the artist"
be - have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun); "John is rich"; "This is not a good answer"
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.

body

noun
1. The physical frame of a dead person or animal:
Slang: stiff.
2. A member of the human race:
3. A number of individuals making up or considered a unit:
4. A group of people organized for a particular purpose:
5. A number of persons who have come or been gathered together:
Informal: get-together.
6. The main part:
Anatomy: corpus.
7. A separate and distinct portion of matter:
8. A measurable whole:
phrasal verb
body forth
To represent (an abstraction, for example) in or as if in bodily form:
The American Heritage® Roget's Thesaurus. Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in classic literature ?
No word, no expression could body forth the kind of relation in which she stood to me--my more than sister, since till death she was to be mine only.
And as I strive to body forth the tale Of all I suffer, all that thou hast done, Forth shall the dread voice roll, and bear along Shreds from my vitals torn for greater pain.
But from whatever cause, the tendency hardened into a ruling convention; thousands upon thousands of medieval manuscripts seem to declare that the world is a mirage of shadowy forms, or that it exists merely to body forth remote and highly surprising ideas.
I'm not settled about whether this phenomenon--a poem expressing a will of its own--needs to be interrogated, or whether I'd prefer my posture toward it to remain reverent and wishful, meaning I want-but must wait--to be inside of a poem that has a will I must attend to, make way for, and body forth. I know it's an archaic term, but "bodying forth" might be as close as I can come to describing this phenomenon.
It is a tribute to the work that the story itself, as it emerges--menacing, elemental, partway mad--is strong enough to carry these sensual details, to body forth from them and gain speed, pulling a focused complexity in its wake back to recognizable life, to healthy reality.
The second part, "Identity and Interpretation," moves more speculatively to query the epistemic and affective differences that play between versions of Borges' texts: philosophical frames of meaning generated by Borges's work, literary critical interpretations that seek to unravel linguistic puzzles and the gestures of style they embody, and visualizations of the stories that body forth even more capacious framings of the experience of reading Borges's fiction.
Of course, it is not immediately clear in what sense this impulse might in fact be female, and the recent show did not body forth a ready answer.
"No word survives the color of the deep," Volkman writes, "this black unsinging"; yet these sonnets body forth demanding vocal performance.