postmortem.

1. An examination of a body after death to investigate cause of death or other bodily findings.

2. A review of an event or failure to understand what happened and why.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• conduct a postmortem
• postmortem findings

On the page

The postmortem established a sequence the witnesses’ accounts could not explain.

She waited for the postmortem findings before naming a cause.

Usage notes

Primary category: horror. Forms: Singular postmortem; plural postmortems. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.