horde

Pluralhordes

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A very large crowd of people, or a great number of animals or things.

   Hordes of tourists descend on the village every August.

   By midsummer a horde of mosquitoes rose from the marsh every evening.

   Similarcrowd, swarm, throng, mob, multitude

   Note

   The everyday use keeps a trace of the raiding nomads: a horde is a crowd you feel beset by, rarely one you welcome. Street vendors, tourists and mosquitoes come in hordes, and Burroughs's fierce and hideous horde shows how easily the word turns menacing. It usually takes of, often in the plural: hordes of visitors. For a neutral large group, crowd or multitude is the kinder word.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A wandering band or gang, especially a tribe of nomads (originally the Tatars) moving from place to place in search of pasture or plunder; any predatory multitude.

   The horde moved west each spring, driving its herds toward fresh grazing land.

   Villages along the river were burned as the horde swept through in search of plunder.

   Similarband

   Note

   The original sense carries the word's whole journey. Turkic ordu named the place where an army or a ruler stayed; Russian ordá made it the clan or troop that lived there, and the word traveled west through Polish, German and French to reach English in 1555, with the Tatars attached to it. The camp became the people, and the loose "large number" sense later shed the wandering and the plunder altogether.

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