corpse

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English corps, a respelling of the earlier cors,^[2][3][4] borrowed from Old French cors (“body; person; corpse; life”),^[5][2][6] from Latin corpus (“body”),^[5][7][8] from Proto-Indo-European *kʷrep- (“body, form, appearance”).^[5][7][9] In the 14th century the French spelling was changed after the Latin to corps, and English followed;^[2][10][11] the inserted p was at first silent, as in French, but began to be pronounced before 1500.^[12][4][9] The final e was rare before the 19th century, and it now distinguishes this word from corps,^[12][10][4] its doublet, as is corpus.^[9] The older form survives as the poetic corse.^[13][5]

Earliest recorded meaning

A dead body: Etymonline dates cors in this sense to the late 13th century,^[5] and the OED's first quotation for the plain sense "dead body" is c1315, in William of Shoreham;^[2] Barnhart dates the form corps to before 1333 and the spelling corpse to 1542.^[3][9]

Semantic evolution

At first the word could mean a living body as well as a dead one: the OED records corpse "the body of a person or animal" from c1325 to 1706,^[2] and until the early 18th century one had to say a dead corpse to be clear.^[14][15] Trench pointed out that dead corpses in the King James Bible (2 Kings 19:35) is therefore not a tautology,^[15][13] and Johnson (1755) still gave "a body, in contempt" as the first sense.^[16] Like French, English also used the word for a body of people or the main mass of a thing (c1380–1651),^[2][5] senses later taken over by corps and corpus.^[11][5] In actors' slang corpse means to spoil a scene by a blunder or by laughing (1859), or to forget one's lines and break into laughter on stage (1874).^[2][6]

Timeline

• late 13th century – cors, a dead body.^[5]
• c1315 – a dead body.^[2]
• c1325–1706 – a living body.^[2]
• before 1333 – the spelling corps.^[3]
• 1542 – the spelling corpse.^[3]
• 1859 – verb, (actors' slang) to put out a fellow actor.^[2]
• 1863 – (racing slang) a horse not meant to win.^[2]
• 1884 – verb, to kill.^[2]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. A dead body, especially of a human being; a cadaver: Police found the corpse in the river.
2. Something no longer active or effective: the corpse of a once great empire.

Verb

1. (theatre slang) Of an actor, to laugh uncontrollably or forget one's lines on stage; to make a fellow actor do so.
2. (slang, dated) To kill.

Related words

• corporate
• corporation
• corporeal
• corps
• corpulent
• corpus
• corse
• corporal
• corset

Usage notes

In Yorkshire and Scottish dialect, corpse also formed compounds such as corpse-candle, a light said to be seen over graves, and corpse-gate, a lych-gate.^[17][5]

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d Barnhart, Robert K., ed. (1995), The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, New York: HarperCollins
4. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
6. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
7. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
9. ^ a b c d Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
10. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
13. ^ a b Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
14. ^ Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
15. ^ a b Trench, Richard Chenevix (1859), A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from Their Present, London: John W. Parker
16. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
17. ^ Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898–1905), The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., Oxford: Henry Frowde; via EDD Online 4.0, University of Innsbruck (CC BY 4.0)