rigor mortis
rigor mortis noun: temporary stiffness of the body's muscles and joints following death.
Noun
rigor mortis (usually uncountable, plural rigor mortises)
- Temporary stiffness of the body's muscles and joints following death.
- Such are the principal phenomena observed during that form of contraction which I conceive to be analogous to the rigor mortis...1840, Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, page 491
- Then we carried in poor Austin from the yard. His muscles were set as hard as a board in the most exaggerated rigor mortis, while the contraction of the fibres had drawn his mouth into a hard sardonic grin.1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC
- Synonyms:
- death-stiffness, rigor
Verb
rigor mortis (third-person singular simple present rigor mortises, present participle rigor mortising, simple past and past participle rigor mortised)
- To stiffen the muscles and joints with, or as if with, rigor mortis.
- As Olive was in the kitchen making some tea I asked what kind of louse the host was. “The kind you like to see laying out on a mortuary slab rigor mortising before the introduction.”1964, Israel Segal, Out of the Womb, Times Press, page 177
- Hands / Responding to bold brain waves, / Hiding feelings, / Twiddling facts, / Dating destinies, / Doting on things, / Withering in death traps, / Snapping brittle, / Folding stiffly / When movement ceases / And rigor mortises the joints.1972, James R. McCready, The Seasons Calling: Haiku & Western-Style Verse, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., →ISBN
rigor mortis meaning in Tamil, Kannada, Malay and Indonesian
rigor mortis in Tamil
- பிண உடல் விறைப்பு, சடல விறைப்பு, பிண விறைப்பு, மரணவிறைப்பு
rigor mortis in Kannada
- ಸೆಡೆತ
rigor mortis in Malay
- temporary stiffness of the body following death
- rigor mortis, kekejuran mayat
rigor mortis in Indonesian
- temporary stiffness of the body following death
- kaku mayat, rigor mortis
More languagesFewer languages
- rigor mortis in Persian
- جمود نعشی
Examples of rigor mortis in a sentence
- […]an unpublished writer who, for all his ambition and flashes of talent, had not been trained in the rigours (nor rigor mortises, for that matter) of a university education.1991, Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry, Oxford University Press, page 56:
- Fingers were rigor mortised to triggers.1996, A. A. Gill, Sap Rising, Black Swan, Transworld Publishers, published 1997, page 131:
- Let the old woman point until her finger rigor mortises and she has to bandage it in the daytime and pretend it got caught between the rocks, grinding corn into meal.2000, Stephen Graham Jones, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Fiction Collective Two, →ISBN, page 99:
- Forget rigor mortising, clutter of taxidermy.2009, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, Persea Books...
Synonyms of rigor mortis
Forms of rigor mortis
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | rigor mortises |
| alternative misspelling | rigour mortis |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | rigor mortises |
| present participle | rigor mortising |
| past participle | rigor mortised |
| past | rigor mortised |
Origin of rigor mortis
Learned borrowing from New Latin rigor mortis (literally “stiffness of death”). First attested in 1842.
Words formed from rigor mortis
Questions about rigor mortis
- What does rigor mortis mean?
- Rigor mortis means temporary stiffness of the body's muscles and joints following death.
- What is rigor mortis in Tamil?
- Rigor mortis in Tamil is பிண உடல் விறைப்பு, சடல விறைப்பு, பிண விறைப்பு. See Rigor mortis meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use rigor mortis in a sentence?
- […]an unpublished writer who, for all his ambition and flashes of talent, had not been trained in the rigours (nor rigor mortises, for that matter) of a university education.
- What part of speech is rigor mortis?
- Rigor mortis can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of rigor mortis?
- The plural of rigor mortis is rigor mortises.
Words near rigor mortis in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rigor mortis (page history and authors); rigor mortis (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); rigor mortis (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-rigor mortis.wav.
Cite this entry: “rigor mortis.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rigor_mortis. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.