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Word for Wednesday: Ghost

With Halloween at the end of the month, our Word for Wednesday theme for October is all things spooky and scary. The first word this month is ghost. A ghost is a spirit of a dead person that appears to the living, often as an image of what they looked like when they were alive. More recently the word has been used as a verb to describe the act of writing someone else’s work for them and, in an online dating context, the act of disappearing from a relationship by suddenly ending all communication. You can read about other words which have changed in meaning thanks to the internet and technology here. Ghost comes from the Old English ‘gast’ which meant ‘good or...

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Word for Wednesday: Nightmare 

It doesn’t seem like such a stretch to assume the word nightmare is related to the English word mare which means 'female horse'. With ghost stories like that of the headless horseman, it doesn’t seem implausible that among the many weird connections and quirks in the English language there might be one about horses and sleeping.  The mare in nightmare actually comes from the Proto-Germanic ‘maron’ meaning ‘goblin’. In German folklore a mare was an evil female spirit or goblin-like creature who suffocated men in their sleep.  Another archaic word for nightmare is incubus which is also the name of a mythological male demon who was believ...

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