Skip to content
OneKitly

horde

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//hɔːd//
  • United States//hɔɹd//
  • Australia//hoːd//
  • //ho(ː)ɹd//

A wandering troop or gang; especially, a clan or tribe of a nomadic people (originally Tatars) migrating from place to place for the sake of pasturage, plunder, etc.; a predatory multitude.

noun

  1. 1

    A wandering troop or gang; especially, a clan or tribe of a nomadic people (originally Tatars) migrating from place to place for the sake of pasturage, plunder, etc.; a predatory multitude.

  2. 2

    A large number of people or things.

    We were beset by a horde of street vendors who thought we were tourists and would buy their cheap souvenirs.

    It is true, the more progressive members of our horde lived in the caves above the river.

    And so Tarzan of the Apes dropped lightly to the turf into the midst of the fierce and hideous horde—he had completed the cycle of evolution, and had returned to be once again a brute among brutes.

Etymology

Recorded in English since 1555. From Middle French horde, from German Horde, from Polish horda, from Russian орда́ (ordá, “horde, clan, troop”), probably from Kipchak Turkic (compare Tatar урда (urda, “horde”)), ultimately from Proto-Turkic *ordu (“place of staying of the army, ruler etc.”). Cognates include Turkish ordu (“camp, army”), Mongolian орд (ord, “court, castle, royal compound, camp, horde”) and Kalmyk орда (orda). Doublet of orda and Urdu.

verb

  1. 1

    To travel en masse; to flock.

    "What wouldst thou insinuate?" replied Elmuton, sarcastically; “has he not been watched, and secretly discovered hordeing with Christians?

Forms

plural
hordes
past tense
horded
past participle
horded
present participle
hording, hordeing
third person singular
hordes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).