Meaning & use
cadaver
Last updated
Meaning
nouncountable
The body of a dead person, especially one given to a medical school for students to study.
Grammar: Countable: a cadaver, several cadavers; used in medical or legal writing.
Patterns
- a cadaver for something
- dissect a cadaver
First-year students learn anatomy by studying a cadaver.
The donor's cadaver was treated with great respect.
Police found a cadaver in the abandoned building.
Word forms
| plural | cadavers |
|---|
Common combinations
- dissect a cadaver
- Students must dissect a cadaver in their anatomy class.
- a human cadaver
- Medical schools rely on donated human cadavers.
- cadaver donation
- She signed up for cadaver donation after her death.
- cadaver dog
- A cadaver dog was brought in to search the field.
- cadaver lab
- The students spent hours in the cadaver lab.
Synonyms and how they differ
- corpse
- Corpse is the general everyday word for a dead body, while cadaver is clinical and used mainly in science and medicine.
- body
- Body is neutral and can mean a living or dead one, but cadaver always means dead.
- remains
- Remains suggests what is left of a body after a long time, whereas cadaver is a body still intact.
- carcass
- Carcass refers to a dead animal rather than a person.
Word family
- cadaverous adjective
- extremely thin and pale, like a corpse
- cadaveric adjective
- relating to a corpse
- cadaver donor noun
- a person whose body is given for medical use
Commonly confused: cadaver or corpse? cadaver or carcass?
cadaver vs corpse
Corpse is the ordinary word, used in news and stories, while cadaver is scientific.
cadaver vs carcass
A carcass is the body of a dead animal, not of a person.
Practice
In which situation would the word cadaver be most natural?
Choose one answer.
Cadaver is a clinical term, so it fits an anatomy class best. The other contexts normally use more everyday words such as body or corpse.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “cadaver”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.