喜樂美語
  1. 1屍體

    A corpse is a dead person’s body. We use it for people, not usually for animals (an animal’s dead body is more often a carcass). You see it in news about accidents and crime, in hospitals, and in crime stories. It is a plain, serious word — not a joke, and not a soft word either. Some people say “the body” when they want to sound a little less hard; corpse does not hide what it is. Though actually, actors have a strange extra use. In the theatre, to corpse is to break — to start laughing when you are supposed to stay in the scene, even a death scene. It comes from the picture of lying there like a dead body and then failing to stay still. That verb is slang among actors; it is not how you talk about a real dead person.

From the word’s history

From earlier corse, from Old French cors, from Latin corpus 'body'; the p was added after the Latin spelling.

經古法文 cors 來自拉丁文 corpus「身體」；p 是照拉丁拼法加回的。

Wiktionary

組成From Old French cors, from Latin corpus (“body”). English later put in the p to look like the Latin spelling. Same Latin root as corps and corpus.

同家族的字

  • corpssame Latin “body”; now a group of soldiers
  • corpussame Latin “body”; now a body of writing

原始詞典資料5 筆記錄

以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。

corpsenoun/kɔːps/

  • 1

    A dead body, especially that of a human as opposed to an animal.

    • 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, […]
  • 2

    The dead body of any animal with flesh; the dead body of a vertebrate; a carcass.

    • 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.
  • 3

    derogatoryarchaicA human body in general, whether living or dead.

corpseverb/kɔːps/

  • 1

    slangTo laugh uncontrollably during a performance.

    • 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.
  • 2

    slangTo cause another actor to do this.

摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。