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''mort'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260723122144-00-⌔

mort - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

mort (countable and uncountable, plural morts)

  • Death; especially, the death of game in hunting.
    • ✤ If you did the wrong thing at the mort or the undoing, for instance, you were bent over the body of the dead beast and smacked with the flat side of a sword.1
  • A note sounded on a horn at the death of a deer.
    • ✤ The sportsman then sounded a treble mort.2
  • (UK, Scotland, dialect) The skin of a sheep or lamb that has died of disease.
  • (card games) A variety of dummy whist for three players.
  • (card games) The exposed or dummy hand of cards in the game of mort.

Noun

mort (plural morts)

  • A great quantity or number.
    • ✤ a mort of water3
    • ✤ Full o’ sut this chimney is. Ain’t been swep’ for a mort o’ years I reckon.4
    • ✤ As it was, he still had a mort of treasure at home in his cave.5

Noun

mort (plural morts)

  • (Internet, informal) A player in a multi-user dungeon who does not have special administrator privileges and whose character can be killed.

Noun

mort (plural morts)

  • A three-year-old salmon.

Noun

mort (plural morts)

  • (obsolete, UK, thieves’ cant) A woman; a female.
    • ✤ Male gypsies all, not a mort among them.6
    • ✤ “Yes, master! I and my mort worships something besides good ale; don’t we, Sue?” and then he leered at the mort, who leered at him, and both made odd motions backwards and forwards, causing the baskets which hung round them to creak and rustle, and uttering loud shouts of laughter, which roused the echoes of the neighbouring hills.7
    • ✤ KINCHIN-MORTS, the Twenty-seventh and last Order of the Canting Crew, being girls of a year or two old whom the Morts (their Mothers) carry at their Backs in Slates (Sheets) and if they have no children of their own they […]8

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /mɔːt/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (US) IPA: /mɔɹt/
  • Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)t

Etymology 1

From Middle English mort, from Old French mort (“death”).

Etymology 2

Compare Icelandic margt, neuter of margr (“many”).

Etymology 3

Clipping of mortal.

Etymology 4

Uncertain.

Etymology 5

UK circa 1560–1890.9 Unknown. Documented possibilities include:

  • From mort (“A three-year-old salmon”), by equation of women with fish.10
  • From Welsh modryb (“aunt”)10
  • From Welsh morwyn (“maid, virgin”)10
  • From French amourette (“a crush”)9
  • From, or cognate with, Dutch mot (“pig, lewd woman”), from Middle Low German mutte.9
  • From French motte (“mound, esp. mons veneris”)11
  • From Romani mintš (“female genitals”). Cognate with English minge.11

Printed 2026-07-23.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1958, Terence Hanbury White, chapter I, in The Once and Future King, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, →ISBN, book I (The Sword in the Stone): ↩

  2. 1814 July 7, [Walter Scott], Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. […], volume, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, chapter 63, in The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC: ↩

  4. 1937, Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon: ↩

  5. 1937 (written, first published in 1949), J. R. R. Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham ↩

  6. 1621, Ben Jonson, The Gypsies Metamorphosed: ↩

  7. 1862, George Borrow, Wild Wales: ↩

  8. 1896, John Stephen Farmer, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present: A Dictionary… with Synonyms in English, French… Etc. Compiled by J.S. Farmer [and W.E. Henley], page 109: ↩

  9. Eric Partridge, The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang. Routledge, 1973. →ISBN. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  10. Green, Jonathon (2012), Crooked Talk: Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime, Random House, →ISBN, page 176 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  11. Albert Barrère and Charles G[odfrey] Leland, compilers and editors (1889–1890), “mort”, in A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant […], volume II (L–Z), Edinburgh: […] The Ballantyne Press, →OCLC. ↩ ↩2

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