Corporal

Corporal is the lowest non-commissioned officer rank in the army. Commissioned officers, lieutenants and above, carried the King or Queen’s Commission, a formal document attesting to their commissioned status as officers in the army. Non-commissioned officers or NCOs, corporals, sergeants etc, carried no such Royal Commission. Corporal comes from the Latin corpus meaning body and has been in common use since the 16th century. A corporal was so-called because he was in charge of a small body of men. Coming from the same Latin root, a corps is a considerably larger body of soldiers comprising several divisions and appeared in the language by 1711. The word corpse which has taken on the specific meaning a dead body also stems from the same root, with only the final e and the pronunciation distinguishing it from corps. See also Lichgate and Lance corporal