occurrence of this word in Old High German.Its immediate context is the destruction of the world by fire, but it is unclear whether the word denotes a person or some other entity. Distinctively, Kolb took uora as a local preposition ('in front of'), with muspilli signifying the Last Judgment itself, or perhaps its location or its presiding Judge.

Related forms are found in two other Germanic languages. The Old Saxon Christian poem Heliand