Happy Halloween!

Today is Halloween, and an appropriate time to look at why we have so many words like ghost, specter, wraith, poltergeist, spook, and apparition.


Ghost is the word with the most etymology. We know it comes from the Old English word gast, which means “soul, spirit, breath, or life”. There are a lot of possible sources for gast, including the Proto-Germanic word ghoizdoz (which explains the Old Saxon word gest, the Middle Dutch word geest, and the German geist) and the Proto-Indo-European base ghois, which means to be excited or frightened.

The Old English word came to prominence as the Biblical translation of the Latin word spiritus, often used to refer to the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost). By the end of the 14th century the word came to be used for a disembodied spirit. Most Indo-European words for spirit also refer to supernatural entities. Many have a sense of “appearance” (Greek phantasma, French spectre, etc.)

The gh- spelling was added in the early 15th century. It was probably influenced by the aforementioned Middle Dutch (and Flemish) word gheest. But it was rarely spelled with the gh- beginning until the mid-15th century. Various phrases have attached the word ghost to describe the subject, like ghost writing and ghost town (ghost town was coined in 1931).

The Greek word phantasma, two paragraphs ago, is the source of our word phantom, which came to English in about 1300, when it was spelled fantum, because the Old French word from which it came directly was fantesme. It took 200 years for the spelling to return to the Greek ph- rather than the French f- (for political reasons, I'm guessing.) Phantom has a sense of illusion that ghost doesn’t convey.

The word wraith was next to arrive, in the 1510s. It is Scottish, but beyond that its origin is unknown. It is defined as an apparition of a living person, portending his or her death. (Remember the Dickens story A Christmas Carol?)

A decade later, in the 1520s, is when apparition appeared. Apparition has a sense of supernatural rather than illusion. There was an Anglo-French word aparicion, which came from the Old French word apparition. The word originally referred to the revealing of the Christ Child to the Wise Men (called the Epiphany) and didn’t get the connotation of ghost until about 1600.

As mentioned above, the French gave us the word specter in about 1600, when it was spelled spectre. The word specter has a connotation of a fearful appearance of a spirit (as opposed to a ghost which may not be visible). The French word refers to an image, figure or ghost. The French got the word from the Latin word spectrum, which means appearance, vision, or apparition.

The word spook appeared in English in 1801. It has a sense of scare, and came from the Dutch word spook, which came from the Middle Dutch spelling spooc, from the German word Spuk, which means ghost or apparition. In Middle Low German it was spelled spok, the same spelling as the Swedish word for scarecrow. Norwegians spelled it with a j: spjok. (Go fjigure.)

Poltergeist came to English in 1838 from German. Literally translated, poltergeist means noisy ghost. (Poltern means make noise or rattle.)

So if you can see the spirit, it will be a phantom, wraith, apparition, specter or spook, and perhaps ghost. But a ghost might not be visible and a poltergeist will only be heard. And none of them involve a sheet with holes in it. So if you see someone in a sheet, it’s not a real ghost, it’s a trick-or-treater.