Word.ws English Dictionary

wyrd

/wɪəd/

wyrd noun: fate, destiny, particularly in an Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse context.

Noun

wyrd (countable and uncountable, plural wyrds)

  1. Fate, destiny, particularly in an Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse context.
    • Wyrd is too vast, too complex for us to comprehend, for we are ourselves part of wyrd and cannot stand back to observe it as if it were a separate force.1983, Brian Bates, The Way of Wyrd: Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer, Century
    • I had journeyed back to England as part of my research on this book to meet with two Englishmen who were practicing Anglo-Saxon shamans who had been researching and practicing the sounds and ways of wyrd.1992, Fred Alan Wolf, The eagle's quest: a physicist's search for truth in the heart of the shamanic world, Simon and Schuster, page 51

Proper noun capitalized: Wyrd

Wyrd

  1. An Old English deity, goddess of fate.
    • Both Wyrd (2574, 2526) and the Mighty Maker (979) measure out dooms, though God is said to control fate (1056).1925, Caroline Harris Stevens, The Treatment of Death in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, page 18
    • No one spoke of where he had gone, or of how he had ended his days. Wyrd had doomed him to die.1961, Norma Lorre Goodrich, “Beowulf”, in The Medieval Myths, New York: The New American Library, page 31

Synonyms of wyrd

8 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Forms of wyrd

pluralwyrds

Origin of wyrd

Learned borrowing from Old English wyrd. Doublet of weird.

Learned borrowing from Old English Wyrd (“Fate”).

Questions about wyrd

What does wyrd mean?
Wyrd means fate, destiny, particularly in an Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse context.
What part of speech is wyrd?
Wyrd can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wyrd?
Wyrd is pronounced /wɪəd/.
What is the plural of wyrd?
The plural of wyrd is wyrds.

Words near wyrd in the dictionary

  1. Wyongah
  2. wype
  3. wypes
  4. wypipo
  5. Wyrallah
  6. wyrd
  7. wyrd folk
  8. wyrds
  9. wyre
  10. Wyre Forest
  11. Wyre Piddle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wyrd (page history and authors); Wyrd (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: “wyrd.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wyrd. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.