bookend
UK/ˈbʊkɛnd/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
British/ˈbɵkɛnd/
bookend noun: a heavy object or moveable support placed at one or both ends of a row of books for the purpose of keeping them upright.
Noun
bookend (plural bookends)
- A heavy object or moveable support placed at one or both ends of a row of books for the purpose of keeping them upright.
- Synonyms:
- book support
- Something that comes before, after, or at both sides of something else.
- The cabinet minister's appearance served as something of a bookend to her grilling by the Home Affairs select committee in April this year[…]2012 November 1, Kelly Fiveash, “Snooper's-charter plans are just misunderstood, sniffles tearful May”, in The Register
- In both Episode 1 and Episode 9, which serve as bookends, Burns found fascinating footage of a 1938 event at which President Franklin Roosevelt spoke to living veterans who wore the Blue and the Gray; […]2017, Douglas Brode, Shea T. Brode, Cynthia J. Miller, The American Civil War on Film and TV, page 214
Verb
bookend (third-person singular simple present bookends, present participle bookending, simple past and past participle bookended)
- To come before and after, or at both sides of.
- Side one has good songs bookended by better songs.2006, Henry Owings, Patton Oswalt, The Overrated Book, →ISBN, page 105
- The tale is bookended by battles – faces meatily pummelled, bones crunchily broken and throats spurtingly sliced as offstage conflicts are placed centre-screen.2015 October 4, Mark Kermode, “Macbeth review – a spittle-flecked Shakespearean war film”, in The Observer
- Synonyms:
- flank
Examples of bookend in a sentence
- […] radio techniques, including the use of sound montage and the placement of musical "bookends" at the beginning and end of radio programs […]2020, Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Radio Nation, page 20:
- And it seemed, perhaps fancifully, that those two moments had become the bookends of a generation and of a nation’s frayed sense of equilibrium.2022 September 19, Alan Cowell, “From Coronation to Funeral: Bookends to the Life of a Queen, and a Generation”, in The New York Times...
- Her aim is to answer questions that “raze to the bone of life”, including the most profound of all: “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?”2020 February 7, P. D. Smith, quoting Maria Popova, “Figuring by Maria Popova review – distillation of a lifetime's reading”, in The...
Synonyms of bookend
Forms of bookend
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | bookends |
| alternative form | book-end |
| alternative form | book end |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | bookends |
| present participle | bookending |
| past participle | bookended |
| past | bookended |
Origin of bookend
From book + end.
Questions about bookend
- What does bookend mean?
- Bookend means a heavy object or moveable support placed at one or both ends of a row of books for the purpose of keeping them upright.
- How do you use bookend in a sentence?
- […] radio techniques, including the use of sound montage and the placement of musical "bookends" at the beginning and end of radio programs […]
- What part of speech is bookend?
- Bookend can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce bookend?
- Bookend is pronounced /ˈbʊkɛnd/ (UK).
- What is the plural of bookend?
- The plural of bookend is bookends.
Words near bookend in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bookend (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “bookend.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bookend. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.