Noun: corpse
| Singular | corpse |
| Plural | corpses |
Sample Sentences
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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, […] [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:]
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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. [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:]
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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. [1898, Friedrich Ratzel, The History of Mankind, volume III, London: Macmillan and Co., page 325:]
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Nelson and I landed next to the half rotted corpse of a horse full of maggots. [2005, J. C. Arlington, A Red Horse Rode Out, West Conshohoken, PA: Infinity Publishing, page 91:]
Nouns inflected like corpse
soldier's woundwort,
Nicosian,
whopper,
greypate,
tactile sign language,
chronotrope,
Rosie Lee,
dissentient,
photoinactivator,
sulphonediimine,
coastal waterfall,
residuary devise,
bituminization,
nitrosonaphthol,
smṛiti,
geosphere,
backscreen,
mensuralist,
flocculate,
flocculant, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
1. From Middle English, from earlier corse, from Old French cors, from Latin corpus (“body”).
2. 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).
3. The verb sense derives from the notion of being unable to control laughter while acting as dead body. See: Latin Nouns '
corpus'.