corpse
/koɹps/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.76 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A dead body, especially that of a human as opposed to an animal.
Example Sentences
- "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, […]"
- "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."
- "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."
- "Nelson and I landed next to the half rotted corpse of a horse full of maggots."
- "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."
- "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."
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /koɹps/
- British English: /kɔːps/