Carcase

The carcase (also carcass) is the main structural box of a piece of case furniture -- a cabinet, bookcase, or dresser's basic shell of top, bottom, sides, and back, before doors, drawers, face frame, or hardware are added. Carcase construction is where a piece's real structural integrity gets decided: how the panels join at the corners, whether shelves are captured in dados or just screwed to cleats, whether the back panel is structural (helping resist racking) or purely cosmetic.

Most of the joinery vocabulary elsewhere in this glossary -- dado, rabbet, dovetail -- shows up specifically in carcase construction, where panels meeting at 90-degree corners need to resist both direct pull-apart forces and racking under load.