lord [OE] The root meaning of lord was ‘keeper of bread’. Old English from hlafweard, it comes from early forms of *loaf and *ward. The corresponding female form is *lady, in Old English hlafdige ‘kneader of bread’. The Devil has many names, among them Lord of the Flies [E17th], the literal meaning of the Hebrew form Beelzebub. In 1954 William Golding published Lord of the Flies, in which a group of schoolboys marooned on an uninhabited island revert to savagery and ritualistic behaviour.