Word.ws English Dictionary

wraith

/ɹeɪθ/

wraith noun: a ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.

wraith: bare trees covered with fog
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Noun

wraith (plural wraiths)

  1. A ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.
    • We might indeed have been the wraiths of the departed dead upon the dead sea of that dying planet for all the sound or sign we made in passing.1912 February–July, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Under the Moons of Mars”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as “Sola Tells Me Her Story”, in A Princess of Mars...
    • Like wraiths with the impediments of bodies they stumbled in the direction of Salthill faces.2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance, paperback edition, Fourth Estate, page 80

wraith meaning in Tamil, Bengali and Malayalam

wraith in Tamil

ஆவியிரட்டை

wraith in Bengali

প্রেতাত্মা, অশরীরী

wraith in Malayalam

spectre, ghost, spirit
പ്രേതാത്മാവ്, പങ്കുതാത്മാവ്, ഭൂതം, പ്രേതം, പിശാച്, പേയ്

Forms of wraith

pluralwraiths

Plural of wraith: wraiths

Origin of wraith

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”).

Words formed from wraith

Words that rhyme with wraith

Questions about wraith

What does wraith mean?
Wraith means a ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.
What is wraith in Tamil?
Wraith in Tamil is ஆவியிரட்டை. See Wraith meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is wraith?
Wraith is a noun.
How do you pronounce wraith?
Wraith is pronounced /ɹeɪθ/.
What is the plural of wraith?
The plural of wraith is wraiths.

Words near wraith in the dictionary

  1. wraggles
  2. wraggling
  3. Wraggs
  4. wrain-bolt
  5. wrain-bolts
  6. wraith
  7. wraithlike
  8. wraithly
  9. wraiths
  10. wraithy
  11. wrake

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wraith (page history and authors); wraith (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); wraith (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); wraith (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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: en-us-wraith.ogg.

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