mort
/mɔːrt/noun
A woman; or death, in separate historical senses
From English cant; uncertain mort (woman) (girl or woman) + O.French mort (death) (death).
Lineage
mort (woman)
mort (death)
The story
This tiny word is actually two historical strangers wearing the same coat. In English cant of the 1560s, a mort meant a girl or woman—sometimes simply “woman,” sometimes with the insinuating suggestion of loose morals—and nobody knows where that slang came from. A separate mort arrived through Middle English from Old French, where mort meant “death”; French still preserves the word in expressions such as la mort. That deathly branch later appears in mortgage, literally Old French mort gaige, “dead pledge”: the pledge was considered dead when the debt was paid, or permanently lost if the borrower defaulted. Terry Pratchett made the collision memorable in 1987 when he named his young apprentice character Mort, turning a French death-word into a comic personal name. So when you meet mort, ask which ghost you are seeing: an obscure sixteenth-century woman—or the Old French shadow of death.
Modern usage
A person portrayed as dull, unintelligent, socially excluded, or—as a separate informal usage—a community-minded individual.
- Heard in
- informal slang · online slang
- See
- Urban Dictionary entries supplied in the research data