Word.ws English Dictionary

ghostly father

ghostly father noun: confessor (priest who hears one’s confessions).

Noun

ghostly father (plural ghostly fathers)

  1. (obsolete) confessor (priest who hears one’s confessions)
    • My ghostly fader, I me confesse,
      First to God and then to you,
      That at a window,—wot ye how?—c. 1415-1440 (date written), Charles, Duke of Orléans, reproduced by E. K. Chambers, Early English Lyrics: Amorous, Divine, Moral and Trivial (1907), p. 31
    • Now will I to my Ghostly fathers Cell, / His Help to craue, and my good hap to tell.c. 1591–1595 (date written), [William Shakespeare], […] Romeo and Juliet. […] (First Quarto), London: […] Iohn Danter, published 1597, →OCLC, [Act II, scene ii]

Examples of ghostly father in a sentence

  • About the latter End of January, 1676, Thomas Thwing, a Priest, and William Rushton, another Popish Priest, who was my ghostly Father, came to my House at Shippon Hall, in Yorkshire […]1680, The Papists bloody Oath of Secrecy […] ; republished as Samuel Johnson, William Oldys, editors, The Harleian Miscellany […] , volume...
  • The second remedy is frequent confession to a discreet ghostly father.1741, Charles Gobinet, The Instruction of Youth in Christian Piety […] , volume 1, page 172:

Forms of ghostly father

pluralghostly fathers

Questions about ghostly father

What does ghostly father mean?
Ghostly father means confessor (priest who hears one’s confessions).
How do you use ghostly father in a sentence?
About the latter End of January, 1676, Thomas Thwing, a Priest, and William Rushton, another Popish Priest, who was my ghostly Father, came to my House at Shippon Hall, in Yorkshire […]
What part of speech is ghostly father?
Ghostly father is a noun.
What is the plural of ghostly father?
The plural of ghostly father is ghostly fathers.

Words near ghostly father in the dictionary

  1. ghostlinesses
  2. ghostling
  3. ghostlings
  4. ghostlore
  5. ghostly
  6. ghostly father
  7. ghostly fathers
  8. ghostmonger
  9. ghostmongers
  10. ghostological
  11. ghostologies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ghostly father (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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