Mogul

How to spell mogul

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mogul

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mogul mean?

1. nounAn extremely rich, powerful, or influential person, especially in a particular industry.
2. nounA hard, rounded bump of packed snow formed on a ski slope.

Mogul in a sentence

• The media mogul owned three newspapers and a television network.

• She carved between each mogul on the steep run.

• A property mogul bought up most of the seafront land.

• A sudden mogul threw the skier off balance.

Where does mogul come from?

Language of origin: Other

In its 'powerful person' sense, mogul comes from the Persian and Urdu word Mughul, which was simply their form of 'Mongol'. It named the Muslim dynasty, the Mughals, who ruled much of India from the early 1500s, descendants of Central Asian conquerors. English writers in the 1500s and 1600s used 'the Great Mogul' for the fabulously rich Mughal emperor, and by the 1800s the word had drifted into a general term for any immensely wealthy and powerful businessman. The skiing sense, a hard bump of packed snow, has a separate and humbler ancestry: it is thought to come from a southern German or Alpine dialect word like 'mugel' meaning a small mound or hillock, and it entered English from the language of Alpine sport in the early twentieth century. The two meanings now share a single spelling by pure coincidence. The single 'g' and the unstressed second syllable, which sounds like a vague 'uhl', are the parts writers most often second-guess.

How the word is built

• mogul (from Persian Mughul, a form of 'Mongol'); a single unsegmented loanword with no separable English affixes