''rigor mortis'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''rigor mortis'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260708194133-00-⌔

rigor mortis - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

rigor mortis (usually uncountable, plural rigor mortises)

• Temporary stiffness of the body’s muscles and joints following death.
  • ✤ Synonyms: death-stiffness, (informal) rigor
  • ✤ Such are the principal phenomena observed during that form of contraction which I conceive to be analogous to the rigor mortis…¹
  • ✤ 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.²
  • ✤ […] an unpublished writer who, for all his ambition and flashes of talent, had not been trained in the rigours (nor rigor mortises, for that matter) of a university education.³
  • ✤ 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.⁴
  • ✤ 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.⁵

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.”⁶
  • ✤ 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.⁷
  • ✤ Fingers were rigor mortised to triggers.⁸
  • ✤ 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.⁹
  • ✤ Forget rigor mortising, clutter of taxidermy.¹⁰
  • ✤ At McCray’s, we had to lift Pa off Flash in the folded position he had rigor mortised to.¹¹

Etymology

Learned borrowing from New Latin rigor mortis (literally “stiffness of death”). First attested in 1842.

Pronunciation

• Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-07-08.

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Footnotes

1. 1840, Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London ‎${}^{[1]}$, page 491: ↩

2. 1913, Arthur Conan Doyle, “”, in The Poison Belt […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC: ↩

3. 1991, Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry, Oxford University Press, page 56: ↩

4. 2009, A.S.Q., The Anatomy of Grief, AuthorHouse, page 109: ↩

5. 2010, Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, Graywolf Press, pages 66–67: ↩

6. 1964, Israel Segal, Out of the Womb, Times Press, page 177: ↩

7. 1972, James R. McCready, The Seasons Calling: Haiku & Western-Style Verse, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., →ISBN: ↩

8. 1996, A. A. Gill, Sap Rising, Black Swan, Transworld Publishers, published 1997, page 131: ↩

9. 2000, Stephen Graham Jones, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, Fiction Collective Two, →ISBN, page 99: ↩

10. 2009, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, Persea Books, page 189: ↩

11. 2017, Albert Bennetti, In a Buffalo Robe, Archway Publishing, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN: ↩

Link to original

Secondary

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