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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A giant or monster in legends and fairy tales that eats humans.
  2. n. A person who is felt to be particularly cruel, brutish, or hideous.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. In fairy tales and popular legend, a giant or hideous monster of malignant disposition, supposed to live on human flesh; hence, one likened to or supposed to resemble such a monster.

Wiktionary

  1. n. A type of brutish giant from folk tales that eats human flesh.
  2. n. A brutish man whose behavior resembles that of the mythical ogre.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. An imaginary monster, or hideous giant of fairy tales, who lived on human beings; hence, any frightful giant; a cruel monster.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. (folklore) a giant who likes to eat human beings
  2. n. a cruel wicked and inhuman person

Etymologies

  1. French, probably ultimately from Latin Orcus, god of the underworld.

Examples

  • “Defense of that contemptible ogre is the very farthest thing from my mind.”

    Think Progress » FEMA Abruptly Abandons Long-Term Recovery Office In New Orleans

  • “I laugh because the ogre is killed!' she replied, 'and because the prince who killed it is sleeping in my house.”

    Tales of the Punjab

  • “So he called the ogre and asked her of him for his wife; but the ogre said it was not his affair, for he had learned that very morning that Violet was the daughter of Cola Aniello.”

    Pentamerone. English

  • “They both seemed to have an "ogre" - whelmingly good time!”

    Wendy Diamond: Howl-oween Pet Costume Party Full of Canine Celebrities

  • “Kafka envisioned a man transformed into a gigantic insect; Homer described the plight of men transformed into pigs; in Shrek 2 an ogre is transformed into a human being, and a donkey into a steed; in Star Trek a scheming villain forcibly occupies Captain Kirk's body so as to take command of the Enterprise; in The Tale of the Body Thief, Anne Rice tells of a vampire and a human being who agree to trade bodies for a day; and in 13 Going on 30 a teenager wakes up as thirty-year-old Jennifer Garner.”

    Is God an Accident?

  • “It is also rather silly to insist that the ogre was a dolt: his IQ was measured by his captors at 138, which means that he had greater analytical abilities than... well, probably most leading democratic politicians.”

    Confession of a Broken Planner, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

  • “The ogre was the most monstrous thing the Solamnic warrior had ever come across.”

    The Reign of Istar

  • “He explained that the ogre was a vegetarian, so would not crunch our bones.”

    Question Quest

  • “Now, as the ogre was a subject of the Prince's father he could not refuse him this trifling pleasure; so he offered him all the rooms in his house; if one was not enough, and his very life itself.”

    Pentamerone. English

  • “When he was young and had both legs -- before something marred him; the translator said 'ogre' -- the sun was always the same brightness and the days were always the same length.”

    The Ringworld Engineers

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Lists

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Comments

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  • yarb Ha ha. And his little ogles get the leftovers. Jan 1, 2008

  • sionnach That's what he would like you to believe, right up until the moment that he scoops you into his mouth, tasty morsel that you are. Dec 31, 2007

  • bilby Ogre is a city in central Latvia. Dec 31, 2007

‘ogre’ has been looked up 1748 times, added to 25 lists, commented on 3 times, and has a Scrabble score of 5.