Other forms: corpses
A corpse is a dead human body. Find the corpse, the corpse was identified, a corpse in the river.
It is the plain word where remains and body are the gentler ones, which is why police and fiction use it and families do not. Note the silent p, inserted by scholars to show the Latin corpus, as the b was in debt; and that corps, the military body, is the same word with the p and s both silent.
1nouncorpseA dead human body.
“The police found a corpse floating in the river.”
corpse is a dead body.
Old French cors comes from Latin corpus, a body. The p was inserted later to show the Latin, and corps is the same word.
Proto-Indo-European
*krep-
Latin
corpus — body
Old French
cors
English, today
corpse
From Middle English -, from earlier corse, from Old French cors, from Latin corpus (“body”). Displaced native likam and lich. The ⟨p⟩ was inserted due to the original Latin spelling. a doublet of corps and corpus, and distantly of a doublet of riff (via Proto-Indo-European -). The verb sense derives from the notion of being unable to control laughter while acting as dead body.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA