Corporal

How to spell corporal

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce corporal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does corporal mean?

1. nounA non-commissioned military rank below sergeant and above private.
2. adjectiveRelating to or affecting the human body, especially in the phrase corporal punishment.

Corporal in a sentence

• noun

  The corporal ordered the squad to fall in before dawn.

• adjective

  Many schools abolished corporal punishment decades ago.

• noun

  After two years of service he was promoted to corporal.

• adjective

  The policy bans any form of corporal discipline in the classroom.

Where does corporal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This single spelling actually carries two strands of ancestry that have braided together. The older adjective, meaning 'of the body', comes straight from the Latin corporalis, built on corpus, which simply meant 'body'; English adopted it in the 1300s, originally in religious and legal phrases such as 'corporal punishment' (penalty inflicted on the body). The military rank arrived later, in the 1500s, through French caporal and Italian caporale, words rooted in capo 'head' or 'chief', ultimately from the Latin caput 'head'; a caporale was the head of a small body of soldiers. The two histories then blurred, partly because an Italian variant corporale (a 'body' of troops) crossed wires with the 'head' sense, leaving us with one spelling for both. The shared corpus root also explains relatives like 'corpse', 'corporation' and 'corporeal', and that family resemblance is precisely why people second-guess whether it ends in -al or wanders toward -eal.

How the word is built

• corpor- (from Latin corpus: body)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)