book-body

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a learned or book-educated person, in northern English dialect

   The village book-body corrected every date in the parish history.

A northern English dialect compound of book + body, with body in its older sense of a person. It referred to someone distinguished by book learning, sometimes with a dismissive implication of impractical or pedantic scholarship.

Topics

External links

• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary
• Google Images