Word.ws English Dictionary

geist

US/ɡaɪst/

geist noun: a ghost, an apparition.

Noun

geist (plural geists)

  1. A ghost, an apparition.
    • The geists eat and drink, but only as geists — not as spirits. ' We have dined,' they say ' sumptuously.' A vapour- ... If dead men tell no tales, their geists will tell them, if they find opportunity.1877, The spiritual magazine
    • Koerg was not slow to recognize a geist; his knees shook, and he dared not utter a word.1881, M.T.W., Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories, reprint edition, Project Gutenberg, published 2005
  2. Spirit (of a group, age, era, etc).
    • The population that today explodes on a stagnant society with a catastrophic echo, is the geist of the times that shock our great nation into a new sense of her grandeur.1974, V. Jagannatha Panicker, Crucifixion of the Unborn: Underpopulated India, Digitized edition, Sivaji Publications, published 2008, page 54
    • However, the geist of the times following the World War was the "normalcy" of Warren G. Harding.1976, Colorado lawyer - Volume 5 (Law), Colorado Bar Association, page 1640

Proper noun capitalized: Geist

Geist (plural Geists)

  1. A surname from German.

Examples of geist in a sentence

  • [...] a term badly applied, as the method is neither a historicism (the belief that each era or period has a geist, principle of identity, or a definable sense of destiny) nor new.1995, Donald Pizer, The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism:
  • ... particular 'culture areas' of the world are dominated by their own peculiar geist or 'cultural soul' ...2009 October 13, Adam Curtis, Lee Ravitz (comment), “Kabul: City Number One - Part 3”, in BBC:

Forms of geist

Noun
pluralgeists
Proper noun
pluralGeists

Origin of geist

From German Geist (“spirit, ghost, mind”). Doublet of ghost.

Borrowed from German Geist.

Words that rhyme with geist

1 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about geist

What does geist mean?
Geist means a ghost, an apparition.
How do you use geist in a sentence?
[...] a term badly applied, as the method is neither a historicism (the belief that each era or period has a geist, principle of identity, or a definable sense of destiny) nor new.
What part of speech is geist?
Geist can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce geist?
Geist is pronounced /ɡaɪst/ (US).
What is the plural of geist?
The plural of geist is geists.

Words near geist in the dictionary

  1. Geissler tubes
  2. Geisslers
  3. geissolosimine
  4. geissoschizine
  5. geissospermine
  6. geist
  7. geists
  8. geitonogamous
  9. geitonogamy
  10. geitost
  11. gejang

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: geist (page history and authors); Geist (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-geist.wav.

Cite this entry: “geist.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/geist. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.