corpse

corpse

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English, from earlier corse, from Old French cors, from Latin corpus (“body”).

Displaced native English likam and lich. The ⟨p⟩ was inserted due to the original Latin spelling. Doublet of corps and corpus, and distantly of riff (via Proto-Indo-European).

The verb sense derives from the notion of being unable to control laughter while acting as dead body.

Pronunciation

Noun

corpse (plural corpses)

  2. A dead body, especially that of a human as opposed to an animal.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:corpse
    • 1865, Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, in Sequel to Drum-Taps: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d and other poems:
      I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, / And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, / I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, […]
    • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:corpse.
  3. The dead body of any animal with flesh; the dead body of a vertebrate; a carcass.
    • 1885, Alexander Wynter Blyth, Poisons, Their Effects and Detection: A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts, volume I, New York: William Wood and Co., page 430:
      Cantharidin, although readily decomposed by chemical agents, is so permanent in the body that it has been detected in the corpse of a cat eighty-four days after death.
    • 1898, Friedrich Ratzel, The History of Mankind, volume III, London: Macmillan and Co., page 325:
      Near Smeinogorsk an octagonal tumulus has been found containing the corpse of a horse near a rectangular one with a human corpse, both within stone circles.
    • 2005, J. C. Arlington, A Red Horse Rode Out, West Conshohoken, PA: Infinity Publishing, page 91:
      Nelson and I landed next to the half rotted corpse of a horse full of maggots.
  4. (archaic, sometimes derogatory) A human body in general, whether living or dead.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:body

Usage notes

In idiomatic usage, the dead body of a nonhuman animal is called a carcass whereas the dead body of a human is called a corpse.

Derived terms

Translations

dead body

Verb

corpse (third-person singular simple present corpses, present participle corpsing, simple past and past participle corpsed)

  1. (intransitive, slang, of an actor) To laugh uncontrollably during a performance.
    • 1989, Kenneth Branagh, Beginning, London: Chatto & Windus, →ISBN, page 94:
      The rest of the day and the week were spent blocking and learning the lines. The only drama was the predictable one of being ticked off for corpsing. Rupert was quite as bad as me when it came to giggling and the tea-party scene which took place between Rupert, David Parfitt, Piers Flint-Shipman and I, was too much.
    • 1993, John Banville, Ghosts:
      There were still moments when she would halt suddenly, like an actor stranded in the middle of the stage, lines forgotten, staring goggle-eyed and making fish-mouths...Corpsing: that was the word.
    • 1993, Bevan Amberhill, The Bloody Man‎[1], Mercury Press, →ISBN:
      Poor Damian corpsed and almost forgot his next lines. The director gave him a terrific lecture, and Alan caught hell from stage management.
  2. (transitive, slang, of an actor) To cause another actor to do this.

Anagrams

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