Horde and Hoard
Tricksy twins
Hordes hoard. So, after a while, the hoards held by the hordes grow so big that other hordes come to take them away. Notwithstanding this relationship, the words ‘horde’ and ‘hoard’ come from two very different places.
‘Horde’ comes from ordu, a Turkish word that means ‘army’. (Urdu, which served as the language of command of the armies of several successive Indian empires, also descends from ordu.)
We get ‘hoard’ from folks, with names like Siegfried and Beowulf, who slew dragons who were sitting upon big piles of treasure. (Some of the descendants of these heroes still use horten as a verb and der Hort to describe the pile of goodies that results.)
Now, how can the likes of us remember how to spell these homonyms?
For one thing, both ‘horde’ and ordu end in vowels. For another, ‘hoard’ ends in ‘d’, and ‘d’ stands for ‘dragon’.
