Word.ws English Dictionary

bookshelve

bookshelve verb: to furnish (a room etc.) with bookshelves.

Verb

bookshelve (third-person singular simple present bookshelves, present participle bookshelving, simple past and past participle bookshelved)

  1. (transitive) To furnish (a room etc.) with bookshelves.
    • Their mutual courtesy remained, and they had their repertoire of comfortable rituals of simulated affection, but that was all. There had been too many houses, too many mortgages, too many false dawns, too many dark and disappointing kitchens, too many curtains that were never made and hung, too...1995, Tim Waterstone, An Imperfect Marriage, London: Headline Review, published 1996, →ISBN, page 129
  2. (figuratively, rare, transitive) To postpone or put aside (a project, etc.); to shelve.
    • In other cases, suppliers had technologies on their roadmaps that were not yet robust enough or cost-effective to be integrated into existing technologies. In such cases, the technology was “bookshelved” and revisited in the next new-product cycle.2002, Robert Monczka, Robert Trent, Robert Handfield, “Purchasing as a Boundary-Spanning Function” (chapter 5), in Purchasing and Supply Chain Management, 2nd edition, Mason, Oh.: South-Western, page...

Forms of bookshelve

third-person singular presentbookshelves
present participlebookshelving
past participlebookshelved
pastbookshelved

Origin of bookshelve

From book + shelve, or a back-formation from bookshelves, the plural of bookshelf.

Questions about bookshelve

What does bookshelve mean?
Bookshelve means to furnish (a room etc.) with bookshelves.
What part of speech is bookshelve?
Bookshelve is a verb.
What is the past tense of bookshelve?
The past tense of bookshelve is bookshelved.

Words near bookshelve in the dictionary

  1. booksellers
  2. bookselling
  3. booksful
  4. bookshelf
  5. bookshelf wealth
  6. bookshelve
  7. bookshelved
  8. bookshelver
  9. bookshelvers
  10. bookshelves
  11. bookshelving

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bookshelve (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.

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Cite this entry: “bookshelve.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bookshelve. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.