The English word mummy is derived from medieval Latin mumia, a borrowing of the medieval Arabic word mūmiya (مومياء) and from a Persian word mūm (wax),[5] which meant an embalmed corpse, and as well as the bituminous embalming substance, and also meant "bitumen".[6] The Medieval English term "mummy" was defined as "medical preparation of the substance of mummies", rather than the entire corpse, with Richard Hakluyt in 1599 CE complaining that "these dead bodies are the Mummy which the Phisistians and Apothecaries doe against our willes make us to swallow".[7] These substances were defined as mummia.
The OED defines a mummy as "the body of a human being or animal embalmed (according to the ancient Egyptian or some analogous method) as a preparation for burial", citing sources from 1615 CE onward.[8] However, Chamber's Cyclopædia and the Victorian zoologist Francis Trevelyan Buckland[9] define a mummy as follows: "A human or animal body desiccated by exposure to sun or air. Also applied to the frozen carcase of an animal imbedded in prehistoric ice".