Half-orc
The half-orc is a fictional creature born to mixed orc and human parentage in the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The half-orc is a playable race for D&D player characters. Half-orcs are typically born in wild frontiers where human and orc tribes come into contact. Half-orcs are between six and seven feet tall (180–210 cm) and usually weigh between 180 and 250 pounds (80–110 kg). This makes them less bulky and more agile than pure-bred orcs, but still taller and stronger than most humans. Half-orcs have pale green skin, jutting jaws, prominent teeth and coarse body-hair.
Half-orcs also appear in The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. In Tolkien's Middle-earth, the half-orcs were the creation of the wizard Saruman and bore several similarities to Sauron's Uruk-hai (greater Orcs) but were taller (man high) and appeared more man-like; there was also another type called Goblin-men which were also said to be man-high but less muscular with sallow skin (instead of black skin like the Uruk-hai) and squinty eyes (one encountered by the hobbits at the Prancing Pony in Bree, and also present among Saruman's forces at the battle of Isengard).
Uruk-hai
The Uruk-hai are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth. They are introduced in The Lord of the Rings as an advanced breed of orcs that serve Sauron and Saruman. The first uruks appeared out of Mordor in attacks on Gondor in T.A. 2475.
Terminology
The name "Uruk-hai" has the element Uruk, which is a Black Speech word related to Orc, related to the word "Urko" in Tolkien's invented language of Quenya. The element hai means "folk", so "Uruk-hai" is "Orc-folk". A similar term is "Olog-hai" ("troll-folk"), used for a breed of especially strong and vicious trolls capable of surviving sunlight.
Christopher Tolkien describes "Uruks" as an anglicization of "Uruk-hai" and his father used the two terms interchangeably a number of times. While "Uruk-hai" means simply "Orc-folk", the term was reserved for the soldier orcs of Mordor and Isengard. The larger orcs called the smaller breeds snaga ("slave").
Literature
The Uruk-hai, described as large black orcs of great strength, first appeared from Mordor about the year 2475 of the Third Age, when they briefly took Ithilien and the city of Osgiliath. These original Uruks were of Sauron's breeding, but Saruman bred his own. Saruman's are shown to be indifferent to sunlight, though whether or not these features are unique to his Uruks is open to question. All Uruks were larger and stronger than other breeds of orc and consequently looked down upon and often bullied them.
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