corse

plural corses

1. obsoleteA (living) body.

   that lewd ribauld with vile lust aduaunst / Layd first his filthy hands on virgin cleene, / To spoile her daintie corse so faire and sheene […]

   1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

2. archaicA dead body, a corpse.

   'Twas then attested that he had been found / At no great distance from the bleeding corse

   1838, Thomas Eagles, Brendallah, A Poem, Whittaker & Co., section LXIII, page 112

   3 more examples

   [W]hat may this meane, / That thou, dead corſe, againe in compleate ſteele, / Reuiſſits thus the glimſes of the Moone, / Making night hideous, and vve fooles of nature, / So horridely to ſhake our diſpoſition, / VVith thoughts beyond the reaches of our ſoules?

   c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shake-speare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: […] (First Quarto), London: […] [Valentine Simmes] for N[icholas] L[ing] and Iohn Trundell, published 1603, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iv], signature C3, recto

   Ambrosio beheld before him that once noble and majestic form, now become a corse, cold, senseless, and disgusting.

   1796, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, Folio Society, published 1985, page 214

   chorus. Thine eyes will tell thee!—Yonder, see the lifeless corse. The Scene opens and discovers the corse of the Queen, her attendants weeping around it. creon. Alas! O new calamity! What more / Of ill hath Fate in store for me? Here, here / Within these arms I clasp my lifeless son: / And yonder see my wife a bleeding corse!

   [1845], Sophocles, translated by [William Bartholomew], An Imitative Version of the Choruses and the Melo-Dramatic Dialogue, with a Synopsis of the Scenes in Sophocles’ Tragedy Antigone; […], London: Joseph Bonsor, […], page 21

1. An uncommon surname originating in Europe, specifically the United Kingdom and Scandinavia.
2. A village and civil parish in Forest of Dean district, Gloucestershire, England (OS grid ref SO7828).