Underworld

How to spell underworld

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce underworld

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does underworld mean?

1. nounThe hidden sphere of organised crime and the people involved in it.
2. nounIn myth and religion, the world of the dead, imagined as lying beneath the earth.

Underworld in a sentence

• The detective spent years infiltrating the city's underworld.

• In Greek myth, Hades ruled the underworld and its shades.

• Several gang leaders dominated the local underworld for a decade.

• The hero descended into the underworld to recover his lost wife.

Where does underworld come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, joining the Old English preposition 'under', meaning 'beneath' or 'below', with 'world', which descends from the Old English 'weorold'. That older word for 'world' is itself a compound of 'wer', meaning 'man', and 'eld', meaning 'age', so it once literally suggested 'the age or life of human beings'. As a single word 'underworld' first carried the literal sense of a region lying physically below, and by the 1600s it was used for the mythological land of the dead beneath the earth, the realm of classical figures such as Hades. The familiar modern sense, the hidden world of organised crime, only emerged in the late nineteenth century, picturing criminal activity as a society operating beneath the respectable surface. Because both halves are plain everyday words, the spelling is straightforward; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, not hyphenated.

How the word is built

• under- (beneath, below)
• world (realm, sphere of life)