Dwarrow
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A dwarf (member of a race of beings usually depicted as having some sort of supernatural powers and being skilled in crafting and metalworking, often as short with long beards, and sometimes as clashing with elves). rare
"No reviewer (that I have seen), although all have carefully used the correct dwarfs themselves, has commented on the fact (which I only became conscious of through reviews) that I use throughout the ‘incorrect’ plural dwarves. I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall have to go on with it. Perhaps my dwarf – since he and the Gnome are only translations into approximate equivalents of creatures with different names and rather different functions in their own world – may be allowed a peculiar plural. The real ‘historical’ plural of dwarf (like teeth of tooth) is dwarrows, anyway: rather a nice word, but a bit too archaic. Still I rather wish I had used the word dwarrow."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"No reviewer (that I have seen), although all have carefully used the correct dwarfs themselves, has commented on the fact (which I only became conscious of through reviews) that I use throughout the ‘incorrect’ plural dwarves. I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall have to go on with it. Perhaps my dwarf – since he and the Gnome are only translations into approximate equivalents of creatures with different names and rather different functions in their own world – may be allowed a peculiar plural. The real ‘historical’ plural of dwarf (like teeth of tooth) is dwarrows, anyway: rather a nice word, but a bit too archaic. Still I rather wish I had used the word dwarrow."
Etymology
Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien as a back-formation of Middle English dwarrows, an irregular plural of dwergh, which became dwarfs in Modern English through leveling with dwarf. Within Tolkien's legendarium, dwarrow is only used in Dwarrowdelf, an alternative name for Moria (see the quotations by Tolkien).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.