It’s October! So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the words you’re going to be encountering in this season. Whether you celebrate Halloween or just the harvest (or nothing at all), I think you’ll agree that the etymologies this month are interesting!

Ghost…Our modern English word comes from Old English gast, which meant “breath; good or bad spirit, angel, demon; person, man, human being.” Though the origins are a bit murky, it’s thought that gast, along with similar words in other Germanic languages, is from the ancient root gheis, which is used to form all sorts of words that convey excitement, fear, or amazement.

Early English translations of the Bible chose to use the word Ghost to render spiritus, the Latin word used to describe not only the soul but the Holy Spirit. So Holy Ghost is one of the few surviving phrases that use ghost in that particular way. Otherwise, the notion of “the disembodied spirit of a deceased person” is the more original sense of the word and has been its primary meaning since the 14th century. It’s certainly interesting to note in that Old English gast, though, that it could be used to describe so many things that go beyond the corporeal.

It’s also interesting to note that in most Indo-European languages, the same words are used to describe both the human spirit and supernatural elements. So whether or not you believe in ghosts that haunt a place, the word is actually linked firmly to the human soul or spirit…and I daresay you DO believe in that! Which I will be considering more fully the next time someone asks if I believe in ghosts. 😉 How about you? Where do you come down on the question?

We’re continuing our October look into spooky words today…with demon. I don’t know about you, but for me, this word conjures up a WHOLE different level of fear. Ghosts and spooks are words assigned to human spirits, but demon…that’s a whole different supernatural level, and one that invokes evil.

Right?

Um…well…if we’re looking at the history of the word, it actually isn’t so cut and dry!

The English word demon, which dates from 1200 as “an evil spirit, a malignant supernatural being, a devil” is taken directly from the Latin and Greek daemon, which means ANY spirit, good or bad, and sometimes used to describe human souls as well. So how did the English come to associate it solely with the evil side?

It’s because the Greek daemon is the word used in the Bible for “unclean spirits,” and Jewish authors also used it in Greek versions of the Old Testament books for “false gods.” Though Greek speakers never would have ONLY used it in this sense…we weren’t Greek speakers, LOL. So demon came to be applied solely to the evil side of the supernatural.

Occasionally writers or academics will want to use the word in the original Greek or Latin sense, especially when translating, so will interject that extra ‘a’ into the word and make it daemon to differentiate.

It’s October! So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the words you’re going to be encountering in this season. Whether you celebrate Halloween or just the harvest (or nothing at all), I think you’ll agree that the etymologies this month are interesting!

Today we’re taking a look at spooky . . . which means really, we’re taking a look at spook, since that’s what it’s a form of. Spook dates from 1801 and is taken from the Germanic. The fun thing is that pretty much all Germanic languages have a work very similar to spook, but the meanings include not only the primary “ghost,” but also, “scarecrow” and “joke.”

In 1942 it began to be applied to spies–presumably because of their abilities to appear and vanish again.