Meaning & use

postmortem

noun·Academic

An examination of a body after death to determine the cause of death, or a review conducted after an event.

See it in a sentence

The coroner ordered a postmortem to determine the exact cause of death.

The team held a postmortem meeting to figure out why the project had failed.

A note on using this word

Beyond medicine, postmortem is widely used in business and project management to mean a review of what went wrong after the fact.

Words with a similar meaning

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