Mortuarie

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A building or room where dead bodies are kept before burial or cremation ; relating to funerals, burial, or the dead in general
2. A facility for storing corpses until they are buried or cremated ; of or connected with burial rites and the handling of the dead
3. A place set aside for holding the bodies of the deceased ; an adjective describing matters linked to death, funerals, or interment

Etymology: In medieval England, a "mortuarie" was not a place at all but a payment. When a parishioner died, the parish priest could claim a customary gift from the estate, often the dead person's best animal or best goods, as a final contribution to the church. The Latin "mortuarium" meant something left for the dead, and the English sense began as this bequest. The Latin root is "mortuus," "dead," from "mori," "to die." The adjective "mortuarius," relating to the dead, produced the noun that English borrowed, and the same root gives us "mortal" and "mortician." The sense of a building where bodies are kept came later, after the fee had lost its meaning. The fee itself was the older and more surprising sense. The word then drifted from a church payment to a place for the dead, and that later meaning is the one that survives today.