Ogre

How to spell ogre

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ogre

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ogre mean?

1. nounA man-eating giant or monster in folklore and fairy tales.
2. nounA cruel, frightening, or brutish person.

Ogre in a sentence

• The bedtime story featured a hungry ogre guarding a stone bridge.

• The staff dreaded their boss, a shouting ogre who terrorised every meeting.

• In the cartoon, a clumsy ogre lived alone in a swamp.

• Behind his gruff manner the old caretaker was no ogre at all.

Where does ogre come from?

Language of origin: French

Ogre came into English from French in the early 1700s, popularised by the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, where an ogre was a man-eating giant. The most widely accepted theory traces the French word back to the Latin Orcus, the name of a god of the underworld and of death, whose realm devoured the living; that grim association may explain the leap to a child-eating monster. From the same Orcus root some scholars also link the word to the creatures J. R. R. Tolkien later called orcs. The spelling keeps its French shape, with the silent-looking '-re' ending that English chose not to anglicise, which is exactly the trap: it is 'ogre', not 'oger' or 'ogor'. The figurative sense, a brutish or frightening person, grew naturally from the folklore monster during the nineteenth century.

How the word is built

• ogr- (monstrous giant)
• -e (French spelling)