Urd's name has an unusually direct and famous afterlife in English literature. The Old English word wyrd, a close linguistic cognate of Urd's own name and originally carrying the same core sense of fate or what has come to pass, survived into Middle English and eventually gave the modern English word weird, which only shifted from meaning fate or destiny to meaning strange or uncanny in a gradual semantic drift over centuries. The clearest surviving link in this chain is literary: the three prophesying witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth are named in the play's stage directions and by other characters as the Weird Sisters, a phrase Shakespeare drew from earlier English chronicle sources, notably Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, which themselves used weird sisters to translate or gloss a native British and Germanic tradition of fate-women descended, at some historical remove, from the same broad Germanic concept of wyrd, that is, of Urd, that the Norse sources preserve in fuller mythological form as one of the three Norns.
Shakespeare's witches are not a direct dramatization of Urd and her sisters, and the specific line of transmission between the Norse Norns and the English weird sisters passed through a long and imperfectly documented history of shared Germanic vocabulary and folklore rather than through any continuous, traceable literary borrowing, but the underlying etymological connection between weird, wyrd and Urd's own name is well established, giving a Norse goddess of fate an unlikely but linguistically genuine descendant in one of the most famous plays in the English language.