Species

Species is a term used to split various unique creatures into separate groups. Numerous species populate Azeroth including orcs, humans, gnomes, trolls, scorpids and murlocs, among many others. Many races can interbreed including humans, high elves,night elves, ogres, orcs, and draenei — producing races like half-elves, half-night elves, half-ogres, half-human half-ogres, and half-draenei. These offspring are often called half-breeds.

Dryads, keepers of the grove, centaur and magnataur may also be truly hybrid races.^{[citation needed]}

Species is often used interchangeably with race, although this is not always the case (not all races are necessarily unique species).

Definition

In World of Warcraft, Blizzard interchanges the terms species and race, giving them roughly the same meaning.

Unfortunately, Blizzard is not always consistent on how they use the terms. Sometimes they use the term '"race" when they mean the biological definition of "species". This has led to conflicts between sources, where one source says blood elves and high elves are the same "biological race" ("biological species" would have been a more proper use of words in that syntax), while most sources say they are separate races (culturally and biologically).

In the Warcraft universe, races like elves, dwarves, humans, orcs, draenei, ogres, goblins, tauren, etc are considered separate species and separate races.

Known lore sapient "species"

This is a list of sapient "species" established in lore. Additionally, each grouping within the same group, such as various types of dwarves, elves, or trolls, are considered separate species/race or subspecies/subrace depending on the source.

• Annihilan^{[citation needed]}
• Dragon
• Ered'ruin^{[citation needed]}
• Eredar^{[citation needed]}
• Furbolg
• Gryphon^{[citation needed]}
• Hippogryph^{[citation needed]}
• Kobold^{[citation needed]}
• Mo'arg^{[citation needed]}
• Quilboar
• Sayaad^{[citation needed]}
• Shivarra^{[citation needed]}