corpus delicti
Americannoun
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the basic element or elements of a crime, as, in murder, the death of the murdered person; the body of facts or evidence showing that a crime has been committed.
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the object, as the body of a murdered person, upon which a crime has been committed and that serves as evidence proving that the crime was committed.
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of corpus delicti
1825–35; < New Latin: “body of the offense”
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
And there’s this one, a pioneering one in California criminal law: a crime even without a corpse, the body of evidence — the corpus delicti.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 21, 2026
So, every time you have some sort of a crime that’s committed, you have to have the corpus delicti, which is a Latin term for the body of the crime.
From Slate ● Jul. 24, 2019
In Worcester, undeterred by the impossibility of producing a corpus delicti, a district attorney sped a State detective to North Brookfield to investigate the 48-year-old death.
From Time Magazine Archive
But in law, corpus delicti means not the body of a victim but the "body of the offense," i.e., evidence that the crime in question has been committed.
From Time Magazine Archive
And now they all gathered in great excitement round the corpus delicti; and there, sure enough, was a long black mole.
From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 by Various
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
