morgue

thumb|upright=1.7|A hospital mortuary and Clinical pathology|pathology laboratory in Bath, England thumb|upright=1.7|Inside view of an abandoned morgue in Deventer, [[Netherlands]] thumb|upright=1.7|A close-up view of a dead body in the morgue in Charité. A morgue or mortuary (in a hospital or elsewhere) is a place used for the storage of human corpses awaiting identification (ID), removal for autopsy, respectful burial, entombment or cremation. In modern times, corpses have customarily been refrigerated to delay decomposition.

==Etymology and lexicology== thumb|Latin phrase "de mortuis nihil nisi bene" ("Of the dead, say nothing but good") written at the old morgue of Eura Church in [[Eura, Finland]] The term mortuary dates from the early 14th century, from Anglo-French mortuarie, meaning "gift to a parish priest from a deceased parishioner," from Medieval Latin mortuarium, noun use of neuter of Late Latin adjective mortuarius "pertaining to the dead," from Latin mortuus, pp. of mori "to die" (see mortal (adj.)). The meaning of "place where the deceased are kept temporarily" was first recorded in 1865, as a euphemism for the earlier English term "deadhouse".