Word.ws English Dictionary

rigour mortis

rigour mortis is the misspelling of rigor mortis.

Meaning of rigor mortis

Noun

rigor mortis (usually uncountable, plural rigor mortises)

  1. (usually) 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

See all 2 meanings of rigor mortis

Origin of rigour mortis

Misconstruction of rigor mortis (“stiffness of death”)

Questions about rigour mortis

What is rigour mortis the misspelling of?
Rigour mortis is the misspelling of rigor mortis.

Words near rigour mortis in the dictionary

  1. rigors
  2. rigosertib
  3. rigosol
  4. rigosols
  5. rigour
  6. rigour mortis
  7. rigourisation
  8. rigourise
  9. rigourism
  10. rigourisms
  11. rigourist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rigour mortis (page history and authors); rigor mortis (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.

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