This means relating to a physical thing – usually a human body – in some way. It’s from the Latin “corpus” which means “body.”
This is also the basis of “corporal,” which we often see in two contexts:
The military rank. However, Merriam disputes this etymology:
The noun corporal […] traces back not to Latin corpus but to Latin caput, meaning “head.”
“Corporal punishment,” which means punishment physically inflicted on the body.
So, what is the difference between corporal and corporeal? Merriam actually has an entire page devoted to that question:
But things do get confusing with this pair. Corporal also has some use in religious contexts: as a noun, it refers to a linen cloth on which the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist are placed. And each word at some point in its history was used to do the job that the other word now typically does.
(I believe that “corporal punishment” should probably be “corporeal punishment.”)
There’s also the Latin legal phrase “habeas corpus,” which translates to “produce the body.” An attorney can invoke Habeas Corpus to force the court to physically produce a person who is being detained to prove the legality of their detention.
Also, the word corpus is often extended to mean an aggregated set of information – “the corpus of Shakespeare’s plays,” for example. The inference is to a “body of information.”