Word.ws English Dictionary

Mordor

UK/ˈmɔːdɔː(ɹ)/US/ˈmɔɹdɔɹ/

Mordor proper noun: an area of peril, darkness, or evil, which people fear to visit or explore.

Proper noun

Mordor

  1. An area of peril, darkness, or evil, which people fear to visit or explore.
    • It is a “Mordor” sort of anthropology, dark rather than light, swampland rather than solid ground.2007, Paul F. M. Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., published 2007, →ISBN, page 94
    • Nevertheless, this book is about the truth, the good and the bad, so I will tread into the forbidden territory, the Mordor of motherhood.2007, B. Erin Wylde, Where Did I Go?, →ISBN, page 100
    Synonyms:
    wasteland, hellscape
  2. (derogatory, slang) Russia.

Examples of Mordor in a sentence

  • “I for one am not venturing a step further into this Mordor.”2012, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, A Grain of Truth: A Second Case for State Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, Bitter Lemon Press (2012; original Polish...
  • “I fled from Moscow, which has turned into Mordor.[…]”2022 April 17, Pjotr Sauer, Andrew Roth, quoting Antonina Baever, “Empty galleries and fleeing artists: Russia’s cultural uncoupling from...
  • They are out in nature for hours a day – despite the fact that the weather’s terrible (we’re talking Mordor from October to March).2024 February 25, Helen Russell, “Play outside and sing together: what living in Denmark taught me about raising ‘Viking’ children”, in The...

Synonyms of Mordor

Origin of Mordor

From Mordor, a bleak realm ruled by the dark lord Sauron, in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth. Tolkien created the name in his constructed language Sindarin, from morn (“dark, black”) and dôr (“land”). Compare with Old English morþor (“murder”), murder, Greek μαυρός (mavrós, “dim”) and Latin mors (“death”). Sense 2 is a semantic loan from Ukrainian Мо́рдор (Mórdor) or Russian Мо́рдор (Mórdor), both of those from English Mordor, alluding to it being the land of orcs.

Questions about Mordor

What does Mordor mean?
Mordor means an area of peril, darkness, or evil, which people fear to visit or explore.
How do you use Mordor in a sentence?
“I for one am not venturing a step further into this Mordor.”
What part of speech is Mordor?
Mordor is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Mordor?
Mordor is pronounced /ˈmɔːdɔː(ɹ)/ (UK).

Words near Mordor in the dictionary

  1. mordication
  2. mordications
  3. mordicative
  4. Mordiford
  5. Mordon
  6. Mordor
  7. Mordorian
  8. Mordorians
  9. Mordovia
  10. Mordovian
  11. Mordovians

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Mordor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Mordor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mordor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.