mortuaire

It appears as a noun in Old French with the meaning of "mortality" (granz mortuaires de genz or "a large number of corpses"). The Latin mortuarum, genitive plural of mortuus ("dead"), receptaculum rerum mortuarum, obsoletarum ("receptacle of "dead", abandoned" things, see main morte), it then takes the meaning of "right levied by the church on the inheritance of deceased parishioners". The adjective is derived from a medieval Latin form mortuarius, "relating to the dead" see mortuus and -arius where mortuus has the substantive form ("a dead person") that it does not have in classical Latin.