Horde

How to spell horde

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce horde

What does horde mean?

1. nounA large, often disorderly group of people moving or gathering together.

Horde in a sentence

• A horde of shoppers pushed through the doors the moment the sale opened.

• The festival drew a horde of fans who filled the field by noon.

Where does horde come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word traces back to the Turkic and Mongol word 'ordu' (also 'orda'), which literally meant a camp, an encampment, or the royal residence and military headquarters of a ruler. As the armies of the Mongol khans swept westward, the term passed into Polish as 'horda' and into other Slavic and Germanic languages, where it came to mean a roving troop or tribe of nomadic warriors. English borrowed it in the sixteenth century, at first describing the wandering bands of Central Asian peoples and only later softening into the general sense of any large, often unruly crowd. The same 'ordu' root, meaning the language of the army camp, also gave us the name of the language Urdu, a memorable cousin to keep in mind. The initial silent h was added in the European spellings, and the silent final e is the detail that helps separate 'horde', a crowd, from its homophone 'hoard', a hidden store.

How the word is built

• horde (from Turkic ordu/orda: a camp or royal army)
• silent -e

Words that sound like horde

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• hoard: To accumulate and store away a large supply of something, often secretly or to excess.