the.com/carcass
What a body becomes once nobody's paying rent inside it anymore.
means The dead body of an animal, or (dismissively) a human body, or the leftover framework/remains of something once it's been stripped of use.
from From Old French 'carcois' or 'carcasse,' which came from a Vulgar Latin root tangled up with 'caro' (flesh — the same root that gives us 'carnal' and 'carnage'). The exact path is murky and etymologists argue over whether a Latin word for 'skeleton' or 'body' fed into it, but by Middle English it had landed as 'carcays,' meaning a dead body — usually an animal's. The spelling wobbled for centuries before settling into 'carcass,' and the word kept its grim, stripped-down sense of flesh and bone with nobody home.
- etymology
- old french carcois, origin genuinely unknown to scholars
- usage shift
- once meant any body, now means dead ones
- butcher term
- the stripped frame left after meat is removed
- insult form
- calling someone a carcass predates zombie movies by centuries