ghost

👻

Meaning

1. The spirit; the human soul.
2. The disembodied soul; the soul or spirit of a deceased person; a spirit appearing after death.
3. Any faint shadowy semblance; an unsubstantial image.
4. A false image formed in a telescope, camera, or other optical device by reflection from the surfaces of one or more lenses.
5. An unwanted image similar to and overlapping or adjacent to the main one on a television screen, caused by the transmitted image being received both directly and via reflection.
6. A ghostwriter.
7. A nonexistent person invented to obtain some (typically fraudulent) benefit.
8. A dead person whose identity is stolen by another. See ghosting.
9. An unresponsive user on IRC, resulting from the user's client disconnecting without notifying the server.
10. An image of a file or hard disk.
11. An understudy.
12. A covert (and deniable) agent.
13. The faint image that remains after an attempt to remove graffiti.
14. An opponent in a racing game that follows a previously recorded route, allowing players to compete against previous best times.
15. Someone whose identity cannot be established because there are no records of him/her.
16. An unphysical state in a gauge theory.
17. A formerly nonexistent character that was at some point mistakenly encoded into a character set standard, which might have since become used opportunistically for some genuine purpose.
18. Clipping of ghost pepper.
19. A game in which players take turns to add a letter to a possible word, trying not to complete a word.
20. White or pale.
21. Transparent or translucent.
22. Abandoned.
23. Remnant; the remains of a(n).
24. Perceived or listed but not real.
25. Of cryptid, supernatural or extraterrestrial nature.
26. Substitute.

spirit

evil spirit

departed soul

dead person

ancestral spirit

dead body

sudden apparition

double image

ghost line

supernatural being

will-o’-the-wisp

white person

spirit of a dead person

disembodied soul

departed spirits

female demon

human spirit

air

humour

bad spirit

Daityas

burning ground

dead soul

phantom line

boggard

boggart

Rowland ghost

grating ghost

death’s soul

bright band

secondary image

fold-over

spectre specter

jack-o’-lantern

Frequency

Pronounced as (IPA)

/ɡəʊst/

Inherited from Middle English gost, from Old English gāst (which was the word for “spirit” as well as “ghost”; the original sense survives in Modern English Holy Ghost), from Proto-West Germanic *gaist, from Proto-Germanic *gaistaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰéysdos, derived from *ǵʰéysd- (“anger, agitation”). The ⟨h⟩ in the spelling appears in the Prologue to William Caxton's Royal Book, printed in 1484, in a reference to the ‘Holy Ghoost’, likely introduced by Caxton's assistant, Wynkyn de Worde, as a result of Flemish influence, where it was spelled gheest at the time. Doublet of geist.

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