A cadaver is a dead human body. Doctors and scientists use this word when the body is there to be studied — in a medical school, in a laboratory, in a report. It is colder and more technical than body, and a little less everyday than corpse. You would not say it about an animal (then you say carcass), and you would not say it to a grieving family; then people say the body or, with care, remains. The word keeps its Latin shape on purpose: it belongs to the hospital, the anatomy room, and the courtroom. Students of medicine meet it early. The matching look-word is cadaverous, but that one has moved: it describes a living person who looks as if they had already died.