The term Urdu came into use when Shah Jahan built the Red Fort in Delhi. The word Urdu itself comes from a Turkic word ordu, "tent" or "army", from which English also gets the word "horde". Hence Urdu is sometimes called "Lashkarī zabān", Persian for "the language of the army". Furthermore, armies of India often contained soldiers with various native tongues. Hence, Urdu was the chosen language to address the soldiers as it abridged several languages.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdu with them. Urdu enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of late Muslim rulers and Nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Persian as the language of elite in the then Indian society.

Urdu continued as one of many languages in Northwest India. In 1947, Urdu was established as the national language of Pakistan in the hope that this move would unite and homogenise the various ethnic groups of the new nation.

historically spelled Ordu is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages Its vocabulary developed under Persian and Sanskrit, to a lesser is the degree of Arabic and Turkic influence on apabhramshas during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD) in South Asia.

It is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 23 official languages of India.

Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardised form of Hindustani. The main differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary more heavily from Persian and Arabic than Hindi, while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit comparatively more heavily.