rigor mortis

See also: rígor mortis

English

Etymology

First attested in 1840. Learned borrowing from New Latin rigor mortis (literally “stiffness of death”).

Noun

rigor mortis (usually uncountable, plural rigor mortises)

1. Temporary stiffness of a body's muscles and joints following death.

   Synonyms: (informal) rigor, death-stiffness

   • 1840, Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London‎^[1], page 491:

     Such are the principal phenomena observed during that form of contraction which I conceive to be analogous to the rigor mortis...

   • 1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “(please specify the page)”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:

     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.

   • 1991, Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry, Oxford University Press, page 56:

     […] an unpublished writer who, for all his ambition and flashes of talent, had not been trained in the rigours (nor rigor mortises, for that matter) of a university education.

   • 2009, A.S.Q., The Anatomy of Grief, AuthorHouse, page 109:

     Its wood can neither be carved nor used for the making of the furniture because of the volatility of those characteristics of the nutrients it has sucked which come from innumerable varieties of rigor mortises.

   • 2010, Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, Graywolf Press, pages 66–67:

     Instead, Tender Buttons destabilizes persistent syntactic arrangements and lexical rigor mortises to assert that “certainly glittering is handsome and convincing,” glittering a radiant process of flux and variance.

Usage notes

Although the orthography of British English prescribes rigour vs. the orthography of American English rigor, "rigour mortis" does not exist. That is a misspelling.

Derived terms

• break rigor
• rigored

Translations

Temporary stiffness of a body's muscles and joints following death

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 屍僵／尸僵 (zh) (shījiāng)

• Dutch: lijkstijfheid (nl)
• Egyptian: (nnw)
• Finnish: kuolonkankeus (fi)
• French: rigidité cadavérique (fr) f, rigor mortis (fr) f
• German: Totenstarre (de) f, Leichenstarre (de) f
• Greek: νεκρική ακαμψία f (nekrikí akampsía)
• Hungarian: hullamerevség (hu)
• Japanese: 死後硬直 (しごこうちょく, shigo kōchoku)
• Polish: stężenie pośmiertne n
• Portuguese: rigor mortis m, rigidez cadavérica f
• Romanian: rigiditate cadaverică (ro) f
• Russian: тру́пное окочене́ние n (trúpnoje okočenénije)
• Spanish: rígor mortis m
• Swedish: likstelhet c
• Turkish: ölü katılığı, ölüm katılığı

Verb

rigor mortis (third-person singular simple present rigor mortises, present participle rigor mortising, simple past and past participle rigor mortised)

1. To stiffen the muscles and joints with, or as if with, rigor mortis.
   • 1964, Israel Segal, Out of the Womb, Times Press, page 177:

     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.”

   • 1972, James R. McCready, The Seasons Calling: Haiku & Western-Style Verse, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., →ISBN:

     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.

   • 1996, A. A. Gill, Sap Rising, Black Swan, Transworld Publishers, published 1997, page 131:

     Fingers were rigor mortised to triggers.

   • 2000, Stephen Graham Jones, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Fiction Collective Two, →ISBN, page 99:

     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.

   • 2009, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, Persea Books, page 189:

     Forget rigor mortising, clutter of taxidermy.

   • 2017, Albert Bennetti, In a Buffalo Robe, Archway Publishing, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN:

     At McCray’s, we had to lift Pa off Flash in the folded position he had rigor mortised to.

French

Noun

rigor mortis f (plural rigor mortis)

1. rigor mortis

Latin

Etymology

rigor (“stiffness”) + mortis (“of death”, genitive singular of mors), i.e. “stiffness of death”.

Noun

rigor mortis m

1. (New Latin) rigor mortis

Portuguese

Noun

rigor mortis m (uncountable)

1. (physiology) rigor mortis (stiffness of a body following death)