disembodied
Britishadjective
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lacking a body or freed from the body; incorporeal
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lacking in substance, solidity, or any firm relation to reality
Explanation
Something that's disembodied is disconnected from a solid form or body. If you hear a disembodied voice coming from your basement, it's spooky and ghostly, with no visible shape or form. Use the adjective disembodied to describe something that's separate from any substantial structure. A magic trick might make it appear that a disembodied head is floating in the air, and a mysterious voice or cry ringing out in the night would also seem to be disembodied. The root of disembodied is the verb embody, which had the earliest meaning of "invest a soul or spirit with a physical form."
Vocabulary lists containing disembodied
And Then There Were None
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The Chocolate War
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The Haunting of Hill House
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
By the end of the book, the reader appreciates even better how misleading it is to think of cellphone calls and the internet as a whole as occurring in an abstract elsewhere, a disembodied cyberspace.
From The Wall Street Journal • Dec. 2, 2025
First comes the warning, that disembodied voice over the tannoy: "Your attention please. Air siren in the city. Please move to the shelter on the minus second floor."
From BBC • Nov. 16, 2025
“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy,” says the disembodied voice.
From Salon • May 17, 2025
The single “Light Sleeper” arrived with a music video boasting a floating disembodied head arriving about halfway through, creating a visual that had no aesthetic father in the culture at that point.
From Los Angeles Times • Nov. 20, 2024
Sometimes Jason stood in the underground temple of Epirus, the giant Clytius looming over him, speaking in a chorus of disembodied voices: It took all of you together to defeat me.
From "Blood of Olympus" by Rick Riordan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
