Word.ws English Dictionary

lilith

/ˈlɪlɪθ/

lilith noun: a type of female Mesopotamian demon, typically seen as coming to men in dreams and as endangering women during pregnancy or childbirth.

Noun

lilith (plural liliths)

  1. A type of female Mesopotamian demon, typically seen as coming to men in dreams and as endangering women during pregnancy or childbirth.
    • [A] Mandaic specimen from Kutha (BM 91715) which contains two independent incantations separated by a line: a historiola relating the expulsion of a particular lilith and the report of a dream purportedly dreamt by the client[.]2004, The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, volume 29, page 31
    • It describes the liliths who are divorced with these words: “naked are you sent forth, nor are you clad, with your hair disheveled and let fly behind your backs.” And indeed, the drawing of the lilith depicts her as naked[.]2013, Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy, page 384

Proper noun capitalized: Lilith

Lilith

  1. A Mesopotamian storm demon, a bearer of disease and death.
  2. (Judaism) The first wife of Adam in Jewish folklore.
    • Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told / (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,) / That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive, / And her enchanted hair was the first gold.1881, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Body’s Beauty”, in Ballads and Sonnets, London: Ellis and White, […], →OCLC, page 240
  3. The "dark moon" or "black moon", a fictitious invisible second moon of Earth proposed by astrologers in the early 20th century. Now often interpreted as the position of the apogee of the actual Moon, or as the empty focus of the Moon's elliptical orbit (Earth occupying the other focus).
  4. A female given name from Hebrew.

Forms of lilith

pluralliliths

Origin of lilith

See Lilith

Borrowed from Hebrew לִילִית (lîlîṯ).

Words formed from lilith

Questions about lilith

What does lilith mean?
Lilith means a type of female Mesopotamian demon, typically seen as coming to men in dreams and as endangering women during pregnancy or childbirth.
What part of speech is lilith?
Lilith can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce lilith?
Lilith is pronounced /ˈlɪlɪθ/.
What is the plural of lilith?
The plural of lilith is liliths.

Words near lilith in the dictionary

  1. lilioids
  2. liliopsid
  3. liliopsids
  4. lilipi
  5. lilipis
  6. lilith
  7. Lilithian
  8. liliths
  9. Liliw
  10. Liljana
  11. liljeborgiid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lilith (page history and authors); Lilith (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-Lilith.wav.

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