Word of the Day:
wraith
What It Means
A ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.
Wraith in Context
“Like wraiths with the impediments of bodies they stumbled in the direction of Salthill faces.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from Middle Scots wraith, first attested in 1513 in a translation of the Aeneid. The word has no certain etymology; it may be a transferred use of Middle Scots wraith, wrath (nominally "anger, rage", adjectivally "angry, wrathful"), thus connecting it to writhe and making it a doublet of wrath and wroth. The old Century Dictionary compares Old Norse vǫrðr (“guardian”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wraith (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “wraith.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wraith. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
