Körper

Körper is a German noun meaning “body.” It denotes the physical self as a living being and, more generally, the tangible form of an object with mass and extension. In everyday language it can refer to the human body, an animal’s body, or the body of a device or artifact when speaking of its physical presence. In physics and common usage, a Körper is any object regarded as a mass that occupies space.

In biology and medicine, the term usually refers to the whole organism (the menschliche Körper) or to a body as a collection of parts, in contrast to organs and tissues. The body is composed of systems such as the skeletal, muscular, and circulatory systems. The word appears in expressions like Körpertemperatur (body temperature), Körperhaltung (body posture), and Körperschmuck (body adornment); the field of body language is referred to as Körpérsprache.

In mathematics, Körper is the standard German term for a field, a set equipped with two binary operations, addition and multiplication, satisfying the usual algebraic laws (associativity, commutativity, distributivity, and the existence of identities and inverses). Examples include the rational, real, and complex numbers, as well as finite fields used in coding theory. The term is also used in astronomy to denote celestial bodies such as planets and stars, and in philosophy to discuss the traditional distinction between body (Körper) and mind.