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underworld

UK/ˈʌndəˌwɜːld/US/ˈʌndɚˌwɚld/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,449 of 15,258neutral

The underworld is the world of organised crime, or the land of the dead. The criminal underworld, underworld figures, a journey to the underworld.

The crime sense is the everyday one and always takes the, since it is treated as a single place. The mythological sense is where the word started, and it survives in writing about Greek and Roman stories.

Jan Brueghel the Younger · Public domain

Definitions of underworld

  1. 1noununderworldThe world of organised crime, or the land of the dead.B2

    “Two names from the underworld were named in the report.”

underworld is a world.

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    world

  2. English

    world

  3. English, today

    underworld

Built from

  • munde · Old French — world

From under- + world. world comes from Middle English world. From Middle English world, from Old English weorold (“world”), from Proto-West Germanic weraldi, from Proto-Germanic weraldiz (“lifetime, human existence, world”) literally “age/era of man”, equivalent to wer + eld. Eclipsed non-native mounde, from monde, munde (“world”). 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

underworld in the wild

  • The concept of an underworld is found in almost every civilization and "may be as old as humanity itself".

    Underworld

  • Common features of underworld myths are accounts of living people making journeys to the underworld, often for some heroic purpose.

    Underworld

  • In Greek mythology, the underworld or Hades is a distinct realm (one of the three realms that make up the cosmos) where an individual goes after death.

    Greek underworld

  • An underworld where the dead live in shadow was common to beliefs in the ancient Near East.

    Shade (mythology)

  • Shades appear in Book Eleven of Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus descends into Hades, and in Book Six of Virgil's Aeneid, when Aeneas travels to the underworld.

    Shade (mythology)

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the munde family

world

underworld — used about once every 939 pages · #4,449 · point at the bar for the others

  • worldly