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ghost

Pronunciation: /ɡəʊst/

The English word “ghost” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A disembodied soul; a soul or spirit of a deceased person; a spirit appearing after death.
  2. A spirit; a human soul.
  3. Any faint shadowy semblance; an unsubstantial image.
  4. A false image, for example in a photographic print or negative, or on a television screen or radar display, or in a telescope, caused by poor or double reception or reflection (from a lens or screen).
  5. A faint image that remains after an attempt to remove graffiti.
  6. A nonexistent person invented to obtain some (typically fraudulent) benefit.
  7. A dead person whose identity is stolen by another (see ghosting).
  8. An unresponsive user on IRC, resulting from the user's client disconnecting without notifying the server.
  9. A copy of a file or record.
  10. An understudy.
  11. A covert (and deniable) agent.
  12. An opponent in a racing game that follows a previously recorded route, allowing players to compete against previous best times.
  13. Someone whose identity cannot be established because there are no records of such a person.
  14. An unphysical state in a gauge theory.
  15. A formerly nonexistent character that was at some point mistakenly encoded into a character set standard, which might have since become used opportunistically for some genuine purpose.
  16. A game in which players take turns to add a letter to a possible word, trying not to complete a word.
  17. White or pale.
  18. Transparent or translucent.
  19. Abandoned.
  20. Remnant; remains.

Etymology

The noun is derived from Middle English gost, from Old English gāst, gǣst (“breath, spirit, soul, ghost”) (compare modern English Holy Ghost), from Proto-West Germanic *gaist, from Proto-Germanic *gaistaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰéysdos, from *ǵʰéysd- (“anger, agitation”). The h in the spelling appears in the Prologue to William Caxton’s Royal Book, printed in 1484, in a reference to the…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.