Mortem

Mortem is a Latin noun meaning death. In English, the term appears in various medical, legal, and technical phrases, most notably postmortem and premortem, and serves as a root in descriptions of death-related phenomena.

In medicine and forensics, postmortem refers to the events after death, especially the postmortem examination (autopsy) used to determine the cause and manner of death when consented or required by law. The autopsy procedure typically includes external examination, internal inspection, laboratory tests including toxicology, and documentation in an autopsy report. The findings contribute to clinical knowledge, mortality statistics, and legal investigations.

In other domains, postmortem analysis is common in information technology and engineering to investigate the root causes of failures after they occur. A premortem, by contrast, is a planning exercise in which a team imagines that a project has failed in order to identify potential risks and mitigation strategies before the project begins.

In biology and zoology, mortem denotes the end of an organism’s life. The term is used primarily in formal or scientific contexts, where distinctions among types of death—such as clinical death, brain death, and cardiac death—may be important for research, medical practice, or regulatory purposes.