Who at one stroke didst pare away three heads from off the shoulders of anOrke, begotten by an Incubus.
1834, "The National Fairy Mythology of England" in Fraser's Magazine for Town and Country, Vol. 10, p. 53:
The chief exploit of the hero, Beowulf the Great, is the destruction of the two monsters Grendel and his mother; both like most of the evil beings in the old times, dwellers in the fens and the waters; and both, moreover, as some Christian bard has taken care to inform us, of "Cain's kin," as were also the eotens, and the elves, and theorcs (eótenas, and ylfe, and orcneas).
2015, Andrew Wilson,The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, page354:
Ukrainians themselves, including those on the right, preferred to call the events the 'Revolution of Dignity', depicted not in terms of ethnicity or class, but in simple civic black and white – a revolution of the people against Yanukovych's 'Mordor' and his 'Orcs'.
2022 March 1, Bruno Maçães, “Europe’s Illusion of Peace Has Been Irrevocably Shattered”, inTime:
And now we must watch the old world go up in flames, in the mad spectacle of Putin’sorcs descending upon Kyiv to execute his macabre plan.
2022 July 25, Michael Wasiura, “Belarusian Exiles Join Ukrainians in Taking Up Arms Against Russia”, inNewsweek[2], retrieved2022-07-25:
Plenty of Belarusian exiles have gone to Europe, but if you run West, then theOrcs [a Ukrainian slang term for "Russian soldiers"] will just follow you there. It's better to risk your life as a free person than to keep running.
For more quotations using this term, seeCitations:orc.
The sense "demon" is uncertain. Two ambiguous occurrences oforc, one in the plural compound wordorcneas inBeowulf (singularorcnē, where*nē means "corpse", as indryhtnē) and the other in a glossary which glosses LatinOrcus as "orc. þyrsꝉ hel deofol", have been interpreted to mean "demon" (including by theOED), and Tolkien held this interpretation when he revived the word with a similar sense in modern English, matching some of the Romance descendants ofOrcus. However, it has been argued that this is a misunderstanding and that both instances are of the other sense, "hell".[1][2]
^Bosworth-Toller lists only the sense "underworld", not "demon", and interprets the glossary entry as "orcþyrs [oþþe] heldeófol" a statement thatOrcus is the god/þyrs/deofol oforc ("hell")
