Flesh, a person, and a mass
In present-day English, body names the physical frame of a human or animal, the trunk as opposed to the head and limbs, and a dead body. It also names a person, as in somebody and nobody, an organized group, as in a governing body, the main part of an object, as in the body of a car or of a text, and a distinct mass, as in a body of water or a heavenly body. Wine, paint, and fabric are said to have body when they feel substantial rather than thin. The scatter of senses is easier to follow once the older meaning is in view: for a long time the word was, first of all, the trunk, or the whole material frame.
Inherited, not borrowed
The origin of the word body is native. English did not take it from French or Latin. Middle English wrote it as bodi, bodiȝ, and a few other spellings. Those forms continue Old English bodig, a neuter noun already in use in the Old English period, that is, before 1150.
In that early stage the word could mean the trunk of a man or a beast, the whole physical structure, stature or height of a person, and, by late Old English, the main or principal part of anything. Bede’s Old English translators could say that a king was tall on bodige, meaning tall in stature, not merely that he possessed a torso. The same noun could also pick out the chest or the backbone as the central piece of the frame.
The closest historical relative is Old High German botah, later Middle High German botech. Those forms named a body, a trunk, sometimes a corpse. Regional German still keeps traces: in Swabian and Bavarian, Bottich can mean a torso. Standard German, though, let the word die. Living flesh is now Leib, a word originally tied to life, or Körper, taken from Latin corpus. English kept bodig and made it an everyday noun of the first rank.
A clear match is missing from North Germanic. For so basic a physical term, a West Germanic distribution this narrow is unusual, and it is one reason later scholars have never agreed on a deeper source.
An older rival, and a root that will not settle
Before bodig became the ordinary English word, Germanic already had another noun for a body, reconstructed as *līką. Its descendants survive in English like, in the churchyard lychgate through which a corpse was carried, and in German Leiche, which now means a dead body. In West Germanic that older word was pushed toward the mortuary edge of the vocabulary. English filled the living sense with bodig rather than with a loan from Latin.
The suffixes do not line up exactly. Old English has -ig; Old High German has -ah on a shared root. A similar mismatch appears in other West Germanic pairs, such as English ivy beside German Efeu. The pattern shows relatedness; it does not, by itself, explain where the root came from.
Here the handbooks disagree, and the honest account is that the distant source is unknown. Some reconstructions set up Proto-West Germanic *bodag and Proto-Germanic *budagą. A few then try to attach that stem to a Proto-Indo-European root *bʰewdʰ-, to be awake or to observe, or to a swell root *bʰew-. Other proposals have linked the noun to bind, to booth, to Breton and Welsh words for the world, and to a cluster of vessel names for tubs, casks, and boxes. None of those derivations has won general assent. Comparisons with Hebrew, or with booth as a tabernacle, fail on chronology: bodig is already Old English, with the physical sense it still has, while booth is a later Scandinavian loan that never meant body.
One further caution is morphological rather than exotic. German Bottich is also the ordinary word for a tub, and some of the vessel names that look similar came into Germanic from Latin or Romance. A body can be imagined as a box or casket, so the comparison is tempting, but borrowing a basic word for the living frame from a wine-jar vocabulary is hard to justify when speakers already had *līką. The safer claim is West Germanic kinship, not a proven Indo-European pedigree.
In the modern language the form is simple. Body is a free noun; compounds and set phrases do the rest. Bodice is a later offshoot, shaped in the sixteenth century from the plural bodies and then taken as the name of a garment that covers the torso.
Senses that grew from the trunk
The corpse sense is early Middle English, from about 1200. Contrast with the soul is in place by the mid-thirteenth century, so the word already marked flesh as opposed to spirit. By about 1300 it could mean a person, a human being. That sense still lives in somebody and nobody, and it survived in older colloquial English as a body for a person.
The late Old English idea of a main part licensed a long series of extensions. The body of a vehicle is recorded from the 1520s. The part of a garment that covers the trunk appears from the 1580s. The main part of a group, any number of people spoken of as one, is from the 1590s. The main portion of a document is from the 1660s. Middle English also moved the word onto matter in general; heavenly body is recorded in the late fourteenth century. Body politic, the state imagined as one organism, is late fifteenth century and keeps French word order, with the adjective after the noun, on the model of corps politique.
Twentieth-century English added specialist phrases on the same stem rather than a new history: body image in 1934, body language around 1967, body count from the Vietnam War in 1968. The noun underneath them is still the Old English one.
What German did instead
The solid takeaway is not a reconstructed Indo-European root, which remains insecure, but a West Germanic split that English and German resolved in opposite ways. English held on to bodig. German let botah fade and either recycled Leib or borrowed Körper for the same job. That is why English still says body where German says Körper or Leib, and why the only close historical sibling of the English noun is a German word most speakers of German no longer use.