Word.ws English Dictionary

bring to book

bring to book verb: to penalise someone for a punishable offence.

Verb

bring to book (third-person singular simple present brings to book, present participle bringing to book, simple past and past participle brought to book)

  1. (UK) To penalise someone for a punishable offence.
    • The perpetrators of this atrocity must be brought to book.
    • It was a little matter of unauthorized and incendiary correspondence between a person who claimed to be the ultimate authority in all matters of the Mohammedan religion throughout the world, and a younger member of a royal house who had been brought to book for kidnapping women within British...1901, Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Forms of bring to book

third-person singular presentbrings to book
present participlebringing to book
past participlebrought to book
pastbrought to book

Words that rhyme with bring to book

38 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about bring to book

What does bring to book mean?
Bring to book means to penalise someone for a punishable offence.
What part of speech is bring to book?
Bring to book is a verb.
What is the past tense of bring to book?
The past tense of bring to book is brought to book.

Words near bring to book in the dictionary

  1. bring to a close
  2. bring to a head
  3. bring to an end
  4. bring to bear
  5. bring to bed
  6. bring to book
  7. bring to ground
  8. bring to heel
  9. bring to justice
  10. bring to life
  11. bring to light

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bring to book (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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