mora

Mora, morae is first declension feminine. Two phrases carry most of its work: sine mora, "at once", and moram facere or moram afferre, "to cause a delay". The verb of the family is moror, morari, "to linger, to hold up", deponent and first conjugation.

The traps are all near-misses. Mora is not mors, mortis, "death", nor morior, "to die", nor mos, moris, "custom" - and that last one is the dangerous one, because the ablative more, "in the manner of", sits a single letter from morae and turns up constantly. Nor is it the Greek metrical mora, which linguists borrowed later for a unit of syllable weight. English keeps it in moratorium and, through French demeurer, in demur.