From Middle English mort, from Old French mort (“death”).
Meanings
(countable, uncountable) Death; especially, the death of game in hunting.
If you did the wrong thing at the mort or the undoing, for instance, you were bent over the body of the dead beast and smacked with the flat side of a sword. 1958, Terence Hanbury White, chapter I, in The Once and Future King, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, →ISBN, book I (The Sword in the Stone):
(countable, uncountable) A note sounded on a horn at the death of a deer.
The sportsman then sounded a treble mort. 1814 July 7, [Walter Scott], Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC:
(Scotland, UK, countable, dialectal, uncountable) The skin of a sheep or lamb that has died of disease.
(countable, uncountable) A variety of dummy whist for three players.
(countable, uncountable) The exposed or dummy hand of cards in the game of mort.
Compare Icelandic margt, neuter of margr (“many”).
Meanings
A great quantity or number.
Full o’ sut this chimney is. Ain’t been swep’ for a mort o’ years I reckon. 1937, Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon:
1937 (written, first published in 1949), J. R. R. Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham
As it was, he still had a mort of treasure at home in his cave.
a mort of water 1849 May – 1850 November, Charles Dickens, chapter 63, in The Personal History of David Copperfield, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1850, →OCLC:
UK circa 1560–1890. Unknown. Documented possibilities include:
* From mort (“A three-year-old salmon”), by equation of women with fish.
* From Welsh modryb (“aunt”)
* From Welsh morwyn (“maid, virgin”)
* From French amourette (“a crush”)
* From, or cognate with, Dutch mot (“pig, lewd woman”), from Middle Low German mutte.
* From French motte (“mound, esp. mons veneris”)
* From Romani mintš (“female genitals”). Cognate with English minge.
Meanings
(UK, obsolete, qualifier:thieves' cant) A woman; a female.
Male gypsies all, not a mort among them. 1621, Ben Jonson, The Gypsies Metamorphosed:
KINCHIN-MORTS, the Twenty-seventh and last Order of the Canting Crew, being girls of a year or two old whom the Morts (their Mothers) carry at their Backs in Slates (Sheets) […]. 1896, John Stephen Farmer, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, page 109:
"Yes, master! I and my mort worships something besides good ale; don't we, Sue?" and then he leered at the mort, who leered at him[…]. 1862, George Borrow, Wild Wales:
With woman steps she followed: the ruffian and his strolling mort. 1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 3: Proteus]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part I [Telemachia], page 47: