Word.ws English Dictionary

bookshelves

bookshelves is the plural of bookshelf.

bookshelves is the third-person singular simple present indicative of bookshelve.

Meaning of bookshelf

Noun

bookshelf (plural bookshelves)

  1. A shelf or shelves for storing books for easy visual reference.
    • Another, with the bump of order unnaturally developed, had his folios and quartos all reduced, in binding, to one size, so that they might look even on his bookshelves.1902, William Blades, The Enemies of Books, 2nd edition, page 102

Meaning of bookshelve

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...

Questions about bookshelves

What is bookshelves the plural of?
Bookshelves is the plural of bookshelf.

Words near bookshelves in the dictionary

  1. bookshelf wealth
  2. bookshelve
  3. bookshelved
  4. bookshelver
  5. bookshelvers
  6. bookshelves
  7. bookshelving
  8. bookshop
  9. bookshopkeeper
  10. bookshopkeepers
  11. bookshoppy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bookshelves (page history and authors); bookshelf (page history and authors); 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: “bookshelves.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bookshelves. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.