Amorite

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. An inhabitant of an ancient Semitic people who lived in Mesopotamia and Canaan ; the extinct West Semitic language once spoken by those people
2. A member of a Semitic group that settled in Mesopotamia and the land of Canaan in antiquity ; the dead Northwest Semitic tongue that these people used
3. One of the ancient West Semitic peoples known from the Bible and Babylonian records ; the now-vanished Semitic language associated with that population

Etymology: The name comes from the Hebrew "'Amori", the people the Bible describes as one of the peoples of Canaan, with "-ite" added on the Latin-derived suffix used to form ethnic and tribal names. The Hebrew term is generally linked to Akkadian "Amurrum", the name Mesopotamian sources gave to the region west of their own lands and to its inhabitants, so the word was already an outside label for a people before any Hebrew speaker used it. Its ultimate source is uncertain, and no single meaning for the root has won general agreement. In English the word is used for the people themselves and, in the Hebrew Bible context, for the groups living in the hill country of ancient Canaan. Because the Bible names them among the nations the Israelites were to face, the term appears most often in historical and religious writing, where it has stayed a fixed label rather than acquiring a wider sense.