(t.), thence in Mongolian, orda , “the royal tent or residence, the royal encampment”, a term which became widespread in the mediaeval Turco-Mongol and then in the Persian worlds, acquiring from the second meaning that of “army camp”.

1. In early Turkish and then Islamic usage

The word ordu appears in some of the earliest known texts of Turkish, sc. in the Kül-tigin inscription (Talât Tekin, A grammar of Orkhon Turkish , Bloomington 1968, 237), and may have passed from such an Inner Asian people as the Hsiung-nu into Chinese as wo-lu-to (* oludu = ordu) (G. Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische El…