corpse

Pluralcorpses

Formscorpses, corpsing, corpsed

1. 1
   dead personnouncountable

   A dead body, especially a human one rather than an animal's.

   Investigators photographed the corpse before it was taken to the morgue.

   After the battle, corpses lay unburied across the fields for days.

   Similarbody, cadaver

   Note

   Here English narrowed a Latin word: corpus meant simply "body". It came through Old French cors into Middle English as corse, and the p was inserted later to match the Latin spelling; it displaced the native words likam and lich. Corps and corpus are doublets from the same Latin word, so mind the ending: only corpse means the dead body.

2. 2
   dead animalnouncountable

   The dead body of any animal with flesh, such as a vertebrate.

   Hikers came across the corpse of a deer a few yards from the trail.

   Vultures circled above the corpses of cattle lost in the drought.

   Similarcarcass, body

   Note

   The animal sense usually announces itself: because a bare corpse is taken to be human, writers name the creature in an of-phrase, as in the corpse of a cat or the half-rotted corpse of a horse. The pattern suits technical prose too; Alexander Wynter Blyth's Poisons (1885) traces a poison in a cat's corpse eighty-four days after death.

3. 3
   laugh on stageverbslangintransitive

   Of an actor, to laugh uncontrollably in the middle of a performance.

   Every night she bit her lip so she wouldn't corpse at his ad-libbed line.

   Two actors corpsed during the dinner scene and had to turn away from the audience.

   Note

   Among actors it names a fault rather than a joke: Kenneth Branagh's Beginning (1989) recalls being ticked off for corpsing, with a colleague "quite as bad" at giggling. The laughter can cost a performer the next line, and John Banville's Ghosts (1993) stretches the word to someone who freezes like an actor stranded mid-stage, lines forgotten, staring goggle-eyed.

4. 4
   laugh on stageverbslangtransitive

   Of an actor, to make a fellow performer laugh uncontrollably during a performance.

   Don't look at him during the proposal scene, or he'll corpse you every time.

   On closing night the lead deliberately corpsed his co-star with a whispered joke.

   Note

   Here the backstage word takes an object, and the object is the actor who cracks up. The past form corpsed serves both uses, so only the object tells them apart: "she corpsed" means she broke down laughing, while "she corpsed him" means she set him off, turning the giggling fit on someone else.

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