autopsy [E17th] In an autopsy someone seeks to find out how a person died by seeing the body with their own eyes. An early sense of the word was ‘personal observation’, and this is the key to the word’s origin. It comes from Greek autoptēs ‘eyewitness’, based on autos ‘self’ and optos ‘seen’, which means that it is related to other English words such as optic [LME] and optician [L17th].