1 Definition
Having no physical body or material substance; existing without a tangible form.
2 In Use
The startup's product was almost incorporeal, a bundle of code and promises with no warehouse, no inventory, nothing you could touch.
3 Word Origin
corpus Lat. · body → incorporeus Lat. · without a body → incorporeal 16th c. English
Incorporeal descends from the Latin corpus, meaning body, the same root that gives English words like corpse and corporation. Adding the negating prefix in produced incorporeus, something explicitly without physical substance. Latin writers used the term in philosophical and legal contexts to separate matters of the body from matters of the mind or spirit. English absorbed the word in the sixteenth century largely through scholarly and theological writing, where the distinction between corporeal and incorporeal things carried real weight in debates about the soul.
💡Fun Fact
Incorporeal has long had a special home in law, where it describes property that exists but can't be touched, things like patents, copyrights, and stock shares, as opposed to a house or a car. Legal scholars still split assets into corporeal and incorporeal categories when sorting out estates and ownership disputes. The word also shows up often in fantasy and horror writing to describe ghosts and spirits that pass through walls, having shed any physical form entirely. In philosophy, the corporeal versus incorporeal debate stretches back to ancient thinkers arguing over whether ideas, numbers, and souls could be said to exist at all without a body to house them.
