bookish
/ˈbʊkɪʃ
/adjective
1(Of a person or way of life) devoted to reading and studying: a bookish, untidy boy the war proved the deepest trauma of a largely bookish life...
- Almost all the topics of conversation were foreign to me, but then I came from a bookish family and was studying philosophy, French, and classics at university.
- They were readers of newspapers and periodicals, they were eternal students in the best sense, they were bookish people.
- By the 1941 Christmas season, the bookish technician got wind of an outlandish project to determine if ethnicity was a factor in the flying business.
Synonyms
studious, scholarly, academic, literary, intellectual, highbrow, erudite, learned, well read, widely read, educated, well educated, well informed, knowledgeable, cultured, accomplished;
pedantic, pedagogical, donnish, bluestocking, cerebral, serious, earnest, thoughtful;
impractical, ivory-towerish
informal brainy, egghead
dated lettered
archaic clerkly
1.1(Of language or writing) literary in style or allusion: his Welsh was rather bookish...
- Actually, I find the candidates a bit adorably nerdy when they lapse into this kind of bookish vocabulary.
- It's movie dialogue, to be sure - no one, especially the sort of low-life characters they tend to write, speaks with such mellifluous, bookish vocabulary.
- Sealed in their Gaelic oral tradition, the Highlanders themselves had little need of a bookish literature, but two great writers were to make them a topic of universal human interest.
Derivatives
bookishly
- Giving me exposure, a whole new perspective, equipped me for life, changed my value system, made me look at life realistically, not bookishly.
- Lorenzo is a bookishly handsome, well-dressed professional with style, grace, and sex appeal.
- Now and then, it's nice to think that they will go for something a little less formal and bookishly precise.
bookishness
/ noun ...- My awkward bookishness could be overcome in that environment through being rather regularly and publicly recognised for achievements in creative writing, drama, public speaking and debating.
- It came as a result of the combination of your bookishness, fertile imagination and love for typography.
- There is no help and no escape for any of us in a story that can't escape its own bookishness.