wraith
A ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.
Noun
- 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...
- 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:
Origin
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”).