Corps means a large group organised for a shared purpose, often military, like the press corps; corpse means a dead body. Memory hook: corpse has the extra 'e' for 'expired'.
The core difference
Corps is a body of people working together, while corpse is a dead human body.
- corps — a military unit or organised group of people: The press corps waited outside the courtroom.
- corpse — a dead body: Police found the corpse near the riverbank.
- corpse — to burst into laughter and break character while performing: The actor corpsed halfway through the scene.
How to tell them apart
Corps and corpse are both descended from the Latin corpus, meaning 'body', making them doublets — along with the word 'corpus' itself. Corps came through French and kept its French pronunciation, with the 's' silent, so it sounds like 'core'. Corpse picked up a silent 'p' in its spelling to echo the Latin original, and its final 's' is pronounced.
Where the mix-up shows up
Because corps is pronounced without the 'p' or final 's' sound, writers who've only heard it spoken sometimes spell it 'corpse' by mistake, or vice versa. A useful check: if you mean a group of people, like the Peace Corps, drop the mental 'p' and 's' sound; if you mean a body, corpse is pronounced exactly as it looks.
