# corpse

Pronunciation: US say "KORPS" /koɹps/; say "KAWPS" UK /kɔːps/, AUS /koːps/

## Noun

1. A dead body, especially a human one rather than an animal's.
   - Simple: A dead body, usually of a person and not an animal.
   - _Investigators photographed the corpse before it was taken to the morgue._
   - _After the battle, corpses lay unburied across the fields for days._
2. The dead body of any animal with flesh, such as a vertebrate.
   - Simple: The dead body of an animal, such as a bird, a fish, or a dog.
   - _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._

## Verb

3. Of an actor, to laugh uncontrollably in the middle of a performance. *(slang)*
   - Simple: Of an actor, to start laughing during a show and not be able to stop.
   - _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._
4. Of an actor, to make a fellow performer laugh uncontrollably during a performance. *(slang)*
   - Simple: Of an actor, to make another actor laugh so hard during a show that they cannot stop.
   - _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._

## Noun

5. A human body of any kind, living or dead. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: A person's body, whether the person is alive or dead.
   - _Get your worthless corpse out of my kitchen before I lose my temper._
   - _The old man hauled his aching corpse up the stairs, one step at a time._

## Origin

From Middle English, from the earlier form corse, which came from Old French cors and ultimately from Latin corpus (“body”); it displaced the native English words likam and lich, and the ⟨p⟩ was inserted to match the original Latin spelling. It is a doublet of corps and corpus, and more distantly of riff. The verb sense comes from the idea of an actor playing a dead body who is unable to control their laughter.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/corpse (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).