Corps

How to spell corps

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce corps

What does corps mean?

1. nounA large organised branch or unit of an armed force.
2. nounAn organised group of people working together in a particular role or profession.

Corps in a sentence

• He served three years in the medical corps during the war.

• The press corps gathered outside the courtroom for a statement.

• The engineering corps rebuilt the bridge within a week.

• The diplomatic corps attended the ambassador's reception.

Where does corps come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the Latin corpus, which simply meant 'body', the same root that gives us 'corpse', 'corporal' and 'corporation'. It passed into Old French as 'cors' and later 'corps', where it broadened from a literal physical body to mean an organised body of people, especially a military formation. English borrowed the French spelling and, crucially, the French pronunciation, so the 'p' and the 's' both stay silent and the word sounds like 'core'. This is the great trap: it looks as though it should rhyme with 'corpse', yet a corps is very much alive while a corpse is dead, even though both descend from the very same Latin word for 'body'. The military and diplomatic senses settled into English in the late 1600s and 1700s, and the silent French ending has survived unchanged ever since.

How the word is built

• corps (from Latin corpus: body), retained whole from French with its silent final consonants

Words that sound like corps

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• core: The central, innermost, or most essential part of something.