Bookshelve
verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 To furnish (a room etc.) with bookshelves. transitive
"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 many rooms never finally bookshelved and decorated."
- 2 To postpone or put aside (a project, etc.); to shelve. figuratively, rare, transitive
"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."
Example
More examples"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 many rooms never finally bookshelved and decorated."
Etymology
From book + shelve, or a back-formation from bookshelves, the plural of bookshelf.
More for "bookshelve"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.