Black Speech Words: Every Attested Word of Mordor's Tongue (and What's Fan-Made)

Quick Answer: Tolkien wrote only a few dozen words of Black Speech. The core is the Ring inscription (ash "one", nazg "ring", durb- "rule", gimb- "find", thrak- "bring", krimp- "bind", burzum "darkness", agh "and", -ûk "all", -ul "them", -ishi "in"), plus names such as Nazgûl, Uruk-hai, Olog-hai and Lugbúrz. Everything beyond that in online "Black Speech dictionaries" is fan-made Neo-Black Speech or film invention.

Black Speech is the most famous language in Middle-earth that almost nobody can actually speak, and for good reason: Tolkien barely wrote any of it. He found it unpleasant to invent, gave it one showpiece sentence, sprinkled a few words across the names of Mordor, and stopped.

That scarcity is why this page exists. Search for "Black Speech dictionary" and you will find long lists of hundreds of words, confidently presented, with no sources. Some of those words are Tolkien's. Most are not. This guide separates the two: every word below is tagged with where it comes from, and the fan-made and film-made material is labelled as such.

If you only want the Ring verse itself, read our full breakdown of the One Ring inscription. This article is the vocabulary hub around it.

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What Black Speech Was

Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings gives the in-world history in a single paragraph. Sauron devised the Black Speech in the Dark Years, meaning it to be the language of all who served him. He failed. After his first overthrow the language was forgotten by all but the Nazgûl, and when he rose again it was spoken only in Barad-dûr and by the captains of Mordor.

Two things follow from that history, and they matter for anyone collecting words:

1. Black Speech is a constructed language inside the story. Sauron built it deliberately, the way Tolkien built Quenya. That is why its grammar in the Ring verse is so regular, with clean stems and stacked suffixes.
2. Most Orcs did not speak it. The Orcs used a scatter of debased dialects, borrowing freely and mangling what they borrowed. Appendix F calls their speech "dreary and repetitive", fit only for abuse. A word heard from an Orc in the books is therefore "Orkish", not necessarily Black Speech.

Tolkien himself said little more. The languages of Mordor were never a project he loved, and he explicitly softened the Black Speech in the published text; readers get just enough to feel its weight.

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The Only Full Text: The Ring Inscription

There is exactly one complete sentence of pure Black Speech in Tolkien's published work:

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" (FotR I.2; Book II ch. 2, the Council of Elrond).

Because the English is given line for line, the sentence can be segmented with confidence. That segmentation is the backbone of every honest Black Speech word list, including this one. The full analysis is in our inscription guide; below we use only its results.

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Attested Word List

Source key: RI = Ring inscription, LotR. App F = Appendix F, LotR. LotR = named in the narrative. PE17 = Tolkien's notes published in Parma Eldalamberon 17 ("Words, Phrases and Passages in The Lord of the Rings").

From the Ring inscription

Notice what the table shows about grammar: Black Speech is agglutinative. Meaning is built by bolting suffixes onto a stem in a fixed order, verb + purpose + object + "all". That is the one grammatical pattern we can actually demonstrate, and it is enough to spot a fake. A "Black Speech" phrase that puts a separate word for "them" in front of the verb is ignoring the only model Tolkien gave us.

From names and Appendix F

Olog-hai deserves a note. Appendix F says these trolls "spoke little or no tongue but the Black Speech of Barad-dûr", which makes the word one of the few pieces of evidence for Black Speech still being a living language at the end of the Third Age.

Orkish words that are not Black Speech

These appear in Orc mouths and Tolkien explained them, but they are borrowings or dialect forms, not Sauron's language:

Tark is a lovely detail. The Orcs took an old Elvish-derived Quenya word for the Men of the West and ground it down into a sneer, which is exactly how Appendix F describes Orkish working: borrowed words, degraded.

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The Orc Curse in The Two Towers

The second longest passage of Mordor-speech is a curse shouted by a Mordor orc at Uglúk in The Two Towers (III.3, "The Uruk-hai"):

Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai!

In the book it is never translated. The narrator only tells us it was a curse in the orc's own tongue. Tolkien's later notes (published in PE17) give a rough rendering along the lines of "Uglúk to the dung-pit with stinking Saruman-filth, pig-guts, gah!", and different notes disagree in detail.

What that means in practice:

• Uglúk and Saruman are names.
• u is plausibly "to", bagronk something like "cess-pool" or "dung-pit".
• pushdug is associated with filth, glob with "fool" or "filth", búbhosh is glossed variously, and skai is an exclamation of contempt.

Because Tolkien's own glosses vary, treat these as approximate. Nothing in this sentence is as secure as the Ring verse, and it is dialect, not the Black Speech proper. Anyone giving you a clean word-for-word gloss of every element is presenting one reading as settled fact.

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Orc Names and What They Reveal

The named Orcs of The Lord of the Rings (Uglúk, Grishnákh, Shagrat, Gorbag, Lugdush, Mauhúr, Snaga, Radbug, Ufthak, Muzgash, Lagduf) are mostly not glossed at all. Tolkien gave them sound, not meaning. They are useful for one thing: they show the phonetic texture he associated with Orkish.

That texture is consistent and easy to hear:

• Back vowels, especially u, a, and long û.
• Heavy consonant clusters: gr, gh, zg, shn, thr.
• Hard final consonants: -k, -g, -z, -sh.
• Almost no e, i, l or y, the sounds that dominate Quenya.

Contrast Grishnákh with a Quenya name like Elendil and the design is obvious. Tolkien built the Elvish and Mordor sound-systems as opposites. If you want to go deeper into how that same deliberate contrast works across all his languages, see Beyond Elvish: every other language Tolkien invented.

The one exception is Snaga, which is a real word: Appendix F glosses snaga "slave", so the Orc in The Two Towers is literally named "Slave" by his betters.

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Film Black Speech (David Salo) — Labelled

Peter Jackson's films needed more than twelve words. Linguist David Salo, who also wrote the films' Sindarin, extended the Black Speech for battle chants, orc dialogue and the Ring's voice. His material has been circulated since as "the Black Speech" and often mixed into fan dictionaries without a label.

Salo's Black Speech is film-coined. It is careful work, built to look like Tolkien's pattern, but it is not Tolkien's. The same distinction we apply to film Sindarin applies here: interesting, legitimate as film canon, never to be cited as something Tolkien wrote.

If a word you are looking at does not appear in the tables above, the likely sources are, in order:

1. Film coinage (Salo, for the Jackson trilogies).
2. Neo-Black Speech, fan reconstructions assembled on forums since the 1990s.
3. Game vocabularies, such as those built for Middle-earth video games.

None of these is wrong to enjoy. They are wrong to present as canon.

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Why You Should Not Tattoo a "Fan Dictionary" Word

People do tattoo Black Speech, usually the Ring verse, and that is at least a real text. The trouble starts when someone wants a personal phrase ("strength", "never surrender", a partner's name) and pulls it from a long online list.

Three concrete problems:

• No attestation. A word like "strength" has no Tolkien Black Speech form. Whatever the list gives you was invented by someone, often without any stated source.
• Inconsistent lists. Different fan lists give different words for the same meaning. Your tattoo will be "wrong" to half the people who can read it.
• Grammar you cannot check. With only one sentence of real grammar, nobody can confirm that a new phrase is well-formed.

If you want something permanent with real Tolkien behind it, either use the Ring verse exactly, or use a single attested word from the tables (burzum, nazg, ash nazg). For anything else, choose an Elvish phrase, where far more is attested. Our Elvish tattoo guide walks through how to check a phrase before it goes on skin.

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Writing Black Speech in Tengwar

The Ring inscription is in Tengwar, the Elvish script. That is the whole point of the scene: Sauron wrote his language in the Elves' letters, and Tolkien drew the result for the book.

Two practical points for anyone reproducing it:

1. The Ring uses a tehtar-style mode, where vowels are marks above consonants. It is not the full-letter Sindarin mode used on the Doors of Durin. Our Tengwar alphabet guide explains how the two systems differ.
2. Copy Tolkien's drawing, not a font auto-conversion. Generic converters often choose a different mode or vowel placement.

You can experiment with writing individual Black Speech words by hand in Tengwar Scribe, which reads back what you draw, or test yourself on the Ring verse and Mordor names with the Tengwar Quiz.

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Pronunciation

Tolkien gave no separate pronunciation guide for Black Speech, but the romanization follows the same conventions as his other languages, so the Appendix E rules apply:

Stress is best treated as falling near the front of the word; the long vowels (û, â) carry extra length. Say the verse slowly: ASH nazg dur-ba-tu-LÛK. At the Council of Elrond Gandalf speaks it aloud and the Elves stop their ears, which tells you how Tolkien wanted it to sound.

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Can You Translate English Into Black Speech?

Not honestly. With a few dozen words and one grammatical pattern, there is no way to render ordinary English sentences without inventing vocabulary. Any "Black Speech translator" is either using fan lists or making words up.

What you can do honestly is:

• Read and pronounce the Ring verse and the names correctly.
• Break down Nazgûl, Uruk-hai, Olog-hai and Lugbúrz into their attested parts.
• Write attested words in Tengwar.

For languages where translation genuinely works because the vocabulary exists, our translator covers Quenya, Sindarin, Klingon and Dothraki, and it tells you when a word is attested versus reconstructed.

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People Also Ask

How many Black Speech words did Tolkien write? A few dozen at most. The Ring inscription gives about a dozen stems and suffixes; Appendix F and the names of Mordor add a few more; Tolkien's notes in Parma Eldalamberon 17 gloss some extra forms.

What does Uruk mean in Black Speech? It is the name for the great soldier-orcs. Uruk-hai adds hai "folk", the same element as in Olog-hai, the troll-folk.

What does Nazgûl mean? "Ring-wraiths": nazg "ring", attested in the Ring verse, plus gûl "wraith".

Are Black Speech and Orkish the same language? No. Sauron devised the Black Speech; the Orcs spoke many debased dialects and often used the Common Speech between tribes. Words like tark and sharkû are Orkish, not Black Speech.

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Related Reading

• The One Ring Inscription: What It Actually Says
• Saruman, Isengard, and the Elvish Language: Black Speech vs Sindarin
• Beyond Elvish: Every Other Language Tolkien Invented
• Adûnaic: The Lost Language of Númenor
• Khuzdul: The Complete Guide to the Dwarven Language
• Tengwar Alphabet: Complete Guide