Etymologically presents
Spooky Etymologies
Ghosts, ghouls and goblins, and the dark histories hidden in everyday words. Light a candle, lock the door, and follow these words back into the dark.
Things that go bump in the night
The monsters of Halloween, and where their names crept in from.
- Old English ghost from gāst “breath, spirit” Before it was a phantom, a ghost was the breath of life itself, which is why we still “give up the ghost”. The spirits of the dead moved into the word only in the late 14th century, and the silent h crept in during the 15th, probably under Flemish influence. Read the full etymology →
- 1786 ghoul from Arabic ghūl A grave-robbing, corpse-eating demon of Arabic folklore, from a verb meaning “to seize”. It reached English through William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek, and later stretched to people with a morbid appetite for the gruesome. Read the full etymology →
- early 14th century goblin from Norman French gobelin A 12th-century chronicle names Gobelinus, a spirit haunting Évreux in Normandy. Before that the trail goes cold: Greek kobalos “rogue”, German kobold and a pet name Gobel have all been suggested. Read the full etymology →
- Old English witch from wicce, wicca Old English had a witch of each sex: wicca, the man, and wicce, the woman. Where the word came from is still a mystery: roots meaning “lively”, “to divine” and “holy” all have their supporters. Read the full etymology →
- c. 1000 werewolf from wer “man” + wulf “wolf” Simply a “man-wolf”. The were- is related to Latin vir “man”, as in virile. Rare after the 1600s, the word was dug up again by 19th-century folklorists. Read the full etymology →
- 1732 vampire from German Vampir, from Slavic It arrived in newspaper reports from Hungary of corpses that rose from the grave and drank the blood of the living. Behind German Vampir lies a Slavic word (Serbian vampir, older upir); what lies behind that is still argued over. Read the full etymology →
- 1788 zombie from a Bantu language It first meant the spirits of the wicked dead who torment the living. The corpse revived by sorcery entered English with William Seabrook’s 1929 account of Haiti. Read the full etymology →
- 1771 banshee from Irish bean sídhe Literally “woman of the fairy mound”: a spirit whose wailing under the window warns a family that one of them is about to die. Read the full etymology →
- 1513 wraith from Scots, origin unknown A wraith can be your own exact double, seen just before your death. Old Norse “guardian”, Gaelic “spectre” and Scots “wrath” have all been proposed as its source; none is proven. Read the full etymology →
- 1838 poltergeist from German, “noisy ghost” From poltern, “to knock, rattle”, plus Geist, the German cousin of ghost: the spirit blamed for rapping on walls and throwing things about. Read the full etymology →
- 1713 ogre from French ogre Charles Perrault’s fairy tales (1697) made the man-eating giant famous, and he may have coined the word. It probably goes back to Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld. Read the full etymology →
- c. 1300 nightmare from night + mare At first not a dream but the dream-bringer: a mare, an evil female spirit who afflicted sleepers with a feeling of suffocation. “Any bad dream” came only in the 19th century. Read the full etymology →
Pumpkins, bones and graveyards
The things of the night itself.
- 1560s Halloween from Scots All-Hallow-even A Scottish shortening of All-Hallow-even, “the eve of All Saints”. Hallow is the old word for a saint, and even an old word for evening. Robert Burns’s poem of 1785 made the word, and the magic lore of the night, popular. Read the full etymology →
- 1647 pumpkin from Greek pépōn “ripe” Greek pépōn was a large melon, “cooked by the sun”. English called it a pompion or pumpion until the 1640s, when it was refashioned with the ending -kin. Read the full etymology →
- 1663 jack-o'-lantern from Jack with the lantern First a night watchman with a lantern, then the will-o’-the-wisp, the ghostly light over marshes. The carved lantern came in the 19th century, and the OED’s first definition of it includes turnips as well as pumpkins. Read the full etymology →
- 1578 skeleton from Greek skeletós “dried up” A skeletón sôma in Greek was a “dried-up body”, a mummy. The bare bones came first; skeleton keys, skeleton crews and skeletons in the closet followed. Read the full etymology →
- early 14th century coffin from Greek kóphinos “basket” For two centuries a coffin was a box or basket for anything, or the pastry crust of a pie. Only in the 1520s did it begin to hold the dead. Read the full etymology →
- late 14th century cemetery from Greek koimētḗrion Literally a dormitory, a “sleeping place”. The Greeks already spoke of death as sleep, and early Christian writers gave the word to the burial ground. Read the full etymology →
- 1392 mummy from Persian mūm “wax” In the Middle Ages mummy was a medicine, made from embalmed bodies believed to contain healing asphalt; merchants even embalmed the bodies of executed criminals to keep up the supply. The bodies themselves were called mummies only from the 1610s. Read the full etymology →
- 1561 tarantula from Taranto, Italy Named after the southern Italian port of Taranto. Its bite was once thought to cause tarantism, and the same city gave its name to the tarantella. Read the full etymology →
- c. 1300 necromancy from Greek nekrós “corpse” Foretelling the future by consulting the dead. Medieval Latin respelled it nigromantia, as if from niger “black”, the black art, until the spelling was corrected in the 16th century. Read the full etymology →
The vocabulary of dread
Words for the feeling at the back of your neck.
- c. 1300 eerie from Old English earg “cowardly” At first the eerie one was the frightened person. Only in 1792 did the word turn around to describe the thing that frightens. Read the full etymology →
- Old English weird from wyrd “fate” Weird was once fate itself. Macbeth’s weird sisters were the Fates, and their strange stage presence turned “fate-controlling” into “uncanny”, and then just “odd”. Read the full etymology →
- early 13th century haunt from Old French hanter To haunt was to do something habitually, then to visit a place often. Shakespeare was the first to send ghosts haunting, in 1590. Deep down the word is probably related to home. Read the full etymology →
- c. 1430 macabre from French danse macabre A survivor of the danse macabre, the medieval Dance of Death in which Death leads away people of every rank. The adjective “gruesome” appeared only in 1889; the link to the biblical Maccabees is popular but unproven. Read the full etymology →
- early 15th century sinister from Latin sinister “left” Latin for “left”. Omens seen on the left were taken to foretell misfortune, though in genuine Roman augury the left could be the lucky side. Read the full etymology →
- 1715 glamour from Scots, from grammar Glamour was a magic spell: a Scots alteration of grammar, from a time when learning and occult learning seemed much the same thing. Sir Walter Scott brought it into literary English. Read the full etymology →
Here lies…
Ordinary words that sound perfectly harmless, until you dig up what they used to mean.
- Here lies a dead pledge now known as mortgage Old French mort gage. Lawyers explained that the pledge “dies” to the borrower who fails to pay, or to the lender once it is paid.
- Here lies a line you crossed at your peril now known as deadline In a Civil War prison camp, a line that prisoners could not cross without risk of being shot (1864). The newspaper sense “time limit” appears by 1919.
- Here lies a fire of bones now known as bonfire A great open-air fire with bones for fuel. It went on to burn heretics and banned books before it became a fire for celebrations.
- Here lies the flesh-eater now known as sarcophagus Greek sarkophágos, “flesh-eating”: a limestone believed to devour the bodies laid in it, and so used for coffins.
- Here lies a harrow, named after a wolf now known as hearse A harrow-shaped frame of candles over a coffin. The harrow was supposedly named for its wolf-like teeth. The vehicle came in the 1640s.
- Here lies the spirits of the dead now known as lemur Linnaeus named these night-roaming primates after the lemures, the restless ghosts of Roman religion.
- Here lies one man in ten now known as decimate To pick by lot and execute every tenth soldier of a mutinous unit. The loose sense “destroy many” dates from the 1660s.
- Here lies an evil star now known as disaster Italian disastro, “ill-starred”: a calamity blamed on the unfavourable position of a planet.
- Here lies the hashish users now known as assassin Arabic ḥaššāšīn, a nickname for a medieval sect reputed in Europe to send out killers against its enemies.
- Here lies the stranglers now known as thug Hindi ṭhag “cheat, thief”: a member of a gang of robbers in India who strangled their victims.