What are orts? That's a weird word that reminds me of orcs from The Lord of the Rings.

The monstrous orcs certainly wouldn't be happy with orts. Orts are little bits, or morsels, of leftover food from a meal. It can also refer to any type of waste. Ort dates from about the 15th century, and it usually appears in the plural.
 

In George Eliot's Silas Marner, the poor residents of Raveloe accept scraps of food as happily as if they were heirlooms:

. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor.
 
 
 
 
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