Warder
name, noun ·2 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A guard, especially in a prison.
"Kent. Mortimer, ’tis I. But hath thy portion wrought so happily? Younger Mortimer. It hath, my lord: the warders all asleep, I thank them, gave me leave to pass in peace."
- 2 A truncheon or staff carried by a king or commander, used to signal commands. archaic
"1595, Samuel Daniel, Civil Wars, in The Poetical Works of Mr. Samuel Daniel, Volume II, London: R. Gosling, 1718, Book I, stanza 62, p. 25, When, lo! the king chang’d suddenly his Mind, Casts down his Warder to arrest them there;"
- 3 a person who works in a prison and is in charge of prisoners wordnet
- 4 One who or that which wards or repels.
"The conspicuous position thus accorded to the cat as a warder-off of evil fortune seems oddly paralleled, though not imitated, by the place accorded to the same animal in popular European folklore."
- 1 A surname from Old English.
Example
More examples"Kent. Mortimer, ’tis I. But hath thy portion wrought so happily? Younger Mortimer. It hath, my lord: the warders all asleep, I thank them, gave me leave to pass in peace."
Etymology
From Middle English warder, wardere, perhaps in part continuing Old English weardere (“one who holds a country; inhabitant”), from Proto-West Germanic *wardārī (“guard, follower, watchman, lookout”), equivalent to ward + -er. Cognate with Dutch waarder (“inspector”), German Low German Wärder (“guard, watchman”), German Wärter (“guard, keeper, attendant”).
From Middle English warder, wardere, also as Middle English warderer, warderere, probably a derivative of Etymology 1 above.
Habitational surname, from the village of Wardour, Wiltshire, named with Old English weard (“guard”) + ōra (“bank, slope”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.