postmortem
9 synonyms and 1 antonym for postmortem, grouped by meaning and by how common each one is.
Noun — An examination of a dead body carried out to establish how the person died.
Synonyms
Everyday swaps
Common words most readers know — safe in any writing.
Less common
Still standard English, but they carry more weight.
Rare, literary or technical
Precise, but they will stand out — check the sense before using one.
Synonyms by Meaning
1. noun
An examination of a dead body carried out to establish how the person died.
“The postmortem showed the cause of death was heart failure.”
2. noun
A review held after a project, event or failure to work out what happened and what should be done differently.
“We ran a blameless postmortem the day after the outage.”
3. adjective
Occurring or carried out after death.
“Postmortem changes to the tissue helped establish the time of death.”
Opposites
How to use postmortem
The word patterns that sound natural to a native speaker.
Written postmortem in American English and often post-mortem in British English. Sense 2 is standard in engineering and business.
Etymology
From Latin post mortem, "after death".
Full origin of postmortem →