One for Osweo

[Liffrea]

I came across this passage in Milton's Paradise Lost:

"and by them stood Orcus and Ades"

Now Orcus is a name for Hades the Greek God of the underworld, but Orc in Old English means Demon, is there an etymological connection between the two?

[Osweo]

Shit... Haven't a clue! :D :o

I know very little about Greek. There must be some etymological dictionary of the language knocking about on t'net, though. :chin:

[Liffrea]

I wonder if it might be a false friend? Then again a lot of Latin and Greek words did enter Old English via the Church.......

[Vrijbuiter]

The word ogre came into wider usage in the works of Charles Perrault (1628-1703) or Marie-Catherine Jumelle de Berneville, Comtesse d' Aulnoy (1650-1705), both of whom were French authors. Other sources say that the name is derived from the word Hongrois, which means Hungarian.[1] The word ogre is thought to have been popularized by the works of Italian author Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), who used the Neapolitan word uerco, or in standard Italian, orco. This word is documented[2] in earlier Italian works (Fazio degli Uberti, XIV cent.; Luigi Pulci, XV; Ludovico Ariosto, XV-XVI) and has even older cognates with the Latin orcus and the Old English orcnēas found in Beowulf lines 112-113, which inspired J.R.R. Tolkien's Orc.[3] All these words may derive from a shared Indo-European mythological concept (as Tolkien himself speculated, as cited by Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, 45). Some see the French myth of the ogre as being inspired by the real-life crimes of Gilles de Rais.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre

I don't know if that can be of any help...

[Osweo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogre

I don't know if that can be of any help...

Excellent work! I never knew that. :)

As back up to that data, here's another link;

orc
"ogre, devouring monster," O.E. orcþyrs, orcneas (pl.), perhaps from a Romanic source akin to ogre, and ult. from L. Orcus "Hell," a word of unknown origin. Revived by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) as the name of a brutal race in Middle Earth.

But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. ["Return of the King," 1955]


orca
"killer whale," 1846, introduced as a generic term for the species by J. Richardson & J.E. Gray in "The zoology of the voyage of HHS 'Erebus' & 'Terror,' " from L. orca "cetacean, a kind of whale." Earlier in Eng., orc, ork "large whale" (c.1590), from Fr. orque, had been used vaguely of sea monsters (see orc).


ogre
"man-eating giant," 1713, hogre (in a translation of a Fr. version of the Arabian Nights), from Fr. ogre, first used in Perrault's "Contes," 1697. and perhaps formed by him from It. orco "demon, monster," from L. Orcus "Hades," perhaps via an It. dialect. In Eng., more literary than colloquial. The conjecture that it is a from Byzantine Ogur "Hungarian" or some other version of that people's name (perhaps via confusion with the bloodthirsty Huns), lacks historical evidence.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=orc&searchmode=none