orc [OE] In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the orcs are ugly, malevolent, goblin-like creatures that attack in hordes and sometimes ride wolves. The word was not invented by Tolkien, and had been used by the Anglo-Saxons, to whom an orc was ‘a demon’. It had died out by ad 1000, but came back into English in the 17th century from Italian orco ‘man-eating giant’. The source in both cases was Orcus, the name of a Roman god of the underworld which was also the root of ogre [E18th]. When Tolkien was writing in the 1930s orc had become rare, and he revived the word—as a noted scholar he would have been aware of the earlier Old English use.