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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • English : nickname from Middle English body, Old English bodig ‘body’, ‘trunk’, presumably denoting a corpulent person. In Middle English the word was also used in the sense ‘individual’, ‘person’.
  • English : occupational name for a messenger, Middle English bode (Old English boda; compare Bothe), with the spelling altered to preserve a disyllabic pronunciation. This development can be clearly traced in Sussex.
  • French : variant of Bodin.
  • Hungarian (Bódy) : variant of Bódi (see Bodi).

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