Word.ws English Dictionary

shoggoth

/ʃɒ.ɡɒθ/

shoggoth noun: a monstrous gelatinous creature featured in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

Noun (1)

shoggoth (plural shoggoths)

  1. A monstrous gelatinous creature featured in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
    • When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became troublesome. With the aid of...1968 [1931], H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, London: Panther Books, page 70
  2. (slang, artificial intelligence) Artificial intelligence, especially a large language model, with a relatable user-facing persona but an incomprehensible and potentially scary interior.
    • The executive explained that the Shoggoth had become a jokey reference among workers in artificial intelligence, as a vivid visual metaphor for how a large language model (the type of A.I. system that powers ChatGPT and other chatbots) actually works.2023 May 30, Kevin Roose, “Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

Noun (2) capitalized: Shoggoth

Shoggoth (plural Shoggoths)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of shoggoth.

Forms of shoggoth

pluralshoggoths
alternative formShoggoth
alternative formshaggoth
pluralShoggoths

Origin of shoggoth

Coined by American writer and editor H. P. Lovecraft.

Questions about shoggoth

What does shoggoth mean?
Shoggoth means a monstrous gelatinous creature featured in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.
What part of speech is shoggoth?
Shoggoth is a noun.
How do you pronounce shoggoth?
Shoggoth is pronounced /ʃɒ.ɡɒθ/.
What is the plural of shoggoth?
The plural of shoggoth is shoggoths.

Words near shoggoth in the dictionary

  1. shoggle
  2. shoggled
  3. shoggles
  4. shoggling
  5. shoggly
  6. shoggoth
  7. shoggoths
  8. Shoghi
  9. shogi
  10. shogoon
  11. shogoonate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoggoth (page history and authors); Shoggoth (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.

Last updated:

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

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