Eccentric, hurt, uses a reference book (9)
I believe the answer is:
thesaurus
'reference book' is the definition.
(I know that thesaurus is a type of wordbook)
'eccentric hurt uses a' is the wordplay.
'eccentric' indicates an anagram.
'hurt'+'uses'+'a'='hurtusesa'
'hurtusesa' is an anagram of 'THESAURUS'.
(Other definitions for thesaurus that I've seen before include "Word-finder" , "storehouse" , "Dictionary" , "Volume of synonyms" , "Reference work" .)