ogre
/ˈəʊɡə
/- A comic-fantasy-adventure filled with magic and music, ogres and elves, giants and wicked stepsisters, the film revisits a classic fairy-tale world with a distinctly 21st century twist.
- When you're a kid, you grow up on fairy tales, witches and giants and ogres.
Synonyms
- In fact, for all that he has been painted in some quarters as a manipulative ogre, one criticism that might be levelled at him is that he is too soft.
- You visit a lot of cities when you're being chased by a giant marketing ogre.
- It was then that Congress, under the leadership of those great ogres, voted by veto-proof majorities to end the arms embargo.
Synonyms
Derivatives
ogreish
/ (also ogrish) adjective ...- I tend to ignore them, after an initial smile to show I'm not entirely ogrish.
- The death of my wife seems to have made me a little… ogrish.
- His face contorted in fury at the murder of his kinsmen, and with a shrill cry he leapt at the nearest of the ogrish guards.
Origin
Early 18th century: from French, first used by the French writer Perrault in 1697.
orc from Old English:
In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings the orcs are ugly, malevolent, goblin-like creatures that attack in hordes and sometimes ride wolves. The word was not invented by Tolkien, and had been used by the Anglo-Saxons, to whom an orc was ‘a demon’. It had died out by ad 1000, but came back into English in the 17th century from Italian orco ‘man-eating giant’. The source in both cases was Orcus, the name of a Roman god of the underworld which was also the root of ogre (early 18th century). When Tolkien was writing in the 1930s orc had become rare, and he revived the word—as a noted scholar he would have been aware of the earlier Old English use.