noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   A student's exercise book containing samples of good handwriting to be copied.

   "She whipped up the cards on the floor, extinguished an unglobed candle, and ruffled open the pages of Claude's copybook."

2. 2
   a book containing models of good penmanship; used in teaching penmanship wordnet
3. 3
   A notebook containing blank, often lined, pages for writing answers. Quebec, UK
4. 4
   A series of instructions or data definitions copied into multiple programs from a shared library; boilerplate.

Example

More examples

"Tear a page out of your copybook."

Etymology

From copy + book.

Related phrases

blot one's copybookdata definitionexercise book

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.