Dictionary Thesaurus Word Dynamo Quotes Reference Translator Spanish

ghost

[gohst]

Royal Ghost Brand www.royalghost.com official online store dress like royalty

New Ghost Movie www.facebook.com/SilentHouse New Horror Thriller "Silent House". Opens March 9. See Trailer Now!

Dream House www.universalstudiosentertainment.com Stars Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz & Naomi Watts! Own it Now on Blu-ray.

Ads

noun

the soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons.

a mere shadow or semblance; a trace: He's a ghost of his former self.

a remote possibility: He hasn't a ghost of a chance.

(sometimes initial capital letter) a spiritual being.

the principle of life; soul; spirit.

EXPAND

Informal. ghost writer.

a secondary image, especially one appearing on a television screen as a white shadow, caused by poor or double reception or by a defect in the receiver.

Also called ghost image. Photography. a faint secondary or out-of-focus image in a photographic print or negative resulting from reflections within the camera lens.

an oral word game in which each player in rotation adds a letter to those supplied by preceding players, the object being to avoid ending a word.

10.

Optics. a series of false spectral lines produced by a diffraction grating with unevenly spaced lines.

11.

Metalworking. a streak appearing on a freshly machined piece of steel containing impurities.

12.

a red blood cell having no hemoglobin.

13.

a fictitious employee, business, etc., fabricated especially for the purpose of manipulating funds or avoiding taxes: Investigation showed a payroll full of ghosts.

COLLAPSE

Haunted Vegas Ghost Tours www.hauntedtoursusa.com Ghosts in Las Vegas? You Bet! It's Ghost Adventures in Las Vegas

verb (used with object)

14.

to ghostwrite (a book, speech, etc.).

15.

to haunt.

16.

Engraving. to lighten the background of (a photograph) before engraving.

:10

:09

:08

:07

:06

:05

:04

:03

:02

:01

Ghost is one of our favorite verbs.

So is yaff. Does it mean:

to bark; yelp.

to swindle, cheat, hoodwink, or hoax.

LEARN MORE FUN, UNUSUAL VERBS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

verb (used without object)

17.

to ghostwrite.

18.

to go about or move like a ghost.

19.

(of a sailing vessel) to move when there is no perceptible wind.

20.

to pay people for work not performed, especially as a way of manipulating funds.

adjective

21.

fabricated for purposes of deception or fraud: We were making contributions to a ghost company.

Idiom

22.

give up the ghost,

to die.

to cease to function or exist.

Origin:
before 900; Middle English goost (noun), Old English gāst; cognate with German Geist spirit

Related forms

ghost·i·ly, adverb

ghost·like, adjective

de·ghost, verb (used with object)

un·ghost·like, adjective

Synonyms
1. apparition, phantom, phantasm, wraith, revenant; shade, spook. Ghost, specter, spirit all refer to the disembodied soul of a person. A ghost is the soul or spirit of a deceased person, which appears or otherwise makes its presence known to the living: the ghost of a drowned child. A specter is a ghost or apparition of more or less weird, unearthly, or terrifying aspect: a frightening specter. Spirit is often interchangeable with ghost but may mean a supernatural being, usually with an indication of good or malign intent toward human beings: the spirit of a friend; an evil spirit.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
Cite This Source

Link To ghost

Example Sentences

It's the season for ghost stories, and colleges always seem to be in the narrative.

Kentucky is also famous for brewing lots of whiskey, as well as for its ghost.

Since the disaster, tales of ghost sightings have become endemic.

EXPAND

It's the season for ghost stories, and colleges always seem to be in the narrative.

Kentucky is also famous for brewing lots of whiskey, as well as for its ghost.

Since the disaster, tales of ghost sightings have become endemic.

Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare.

Today, many of those once-prosperous settlements are ghost towns.

His employee discovers he doesn't have a ghost of a chance of heading home for the holidays.

The workers are now beginning to wake from their slumber, and that old ghost is reported haunting the world again.

Twenty-three percent claimed to have seen a ghost or sensed one's presence.

Okay, it's a little rougher than roasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories.

The ambitious resorts long ago turned into near ghost towns.

It might be a useful thing for every scientist and scientific organization to hire ghost writers from that category.

Nevertheless, it was nearly destroyed by fire and bombardment, and was a ghost town by war's end.

Could be a fun way to identify ghost writers, but you'd also have to take into consideration editors and proof-readers and such.

Walk through a ghost town and underground mine, recreated with precise detail.

It might be a bit premature to advocate giving up the ghost on growth.

Every hour it used to appear, this ghost from the past.

Now observations of so-called ghost cavities in the clusters suggest that these bubbles may be the source.

Food companies are using new campaigns to keep so-called ghost brands from fading further into obscurity.

The problem of ghost writing is even more serious than this article portrays.

They want a ghost in a shell world people will stop them.

Put a ghost in your ghost town photographsand other easy tips to create cool pictures.

We still cling stubbornly to the idea of an animating soul, a spiritual ghost in the biological machine.

When those resources have been used up, the cities sometimes become ghost towns.

These are fun because everything is seen through a shattered mirror and float-y shadows and ghost shapes.

Cynics will wonder why she is exhuming his ghost six years later.

All that remains of the mining days are ghost towns and tombstones.

Invoking the son as god erases the holy ghost and the father.

He found that those who had been told the ghost story were much quicker to press the space bar than those who had not.

In rare cases, corporate map producers have added a ghost or two to the government's data:.

False premise about false positive, perhaps it was the fish's ghost or spirit responding.

The bustling destinations where work may be found today could become ghost towns by the time the financing is paid off.

Ghost calls have long been a staple of horror movies and urban legends.

COLLAPSE

Collins

World English Dictionary

ghost (ɡəʊst)

—n
1.	the disembodied spirit of a dead person, supposed to haunt the living as a pale or shadowy vision; phantomRelated: spectral
2.	a haunting memory: the ghost of his former life rose up before him
3.	a faint trace or possibility of something; glimmer: a ghost of a smile
4.	the spirit; soul (archaic, except in the phrase the Holy Ghost)
5.	physics
	a. a faint secondary image produced by an optical system
	b. a similar image on a television screen, formed by reflection of the transmitting waves or by a defect in the receiver
6.	See ghost word
7.	Also called: ghost edition an entry recorded in a bibliography of which no actual proof exists
8.	See ghostwrite Another name for ghostwriter
9.	(modifier) falsely recorded as doing a particular job or fulfilling a particular function in order that some benefit, esp money, may be obtained: a ghost worker
10.	give up the ghost
	a. to die
	b. (of a machine) to stop working

—vb
11.	See ghostwrite
12.	(tr) to haunt
13.	(intr) to move effortlessly and smoothly, esp unnoticed: he ghosted into the penalty area

Related: spectral

[Old English gāst; related to Old Frisian jēst, Old High German geist spirit, Sanskrit hēda fury, anger]

'ghostlike

—*adj*

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

Etymonline

Word Origin & History

ghost

O.E. gast "soul, spirit, life, breath," from P.Gmc. *ghoizdoz (cf. O.S. gest, O.Fris. jest, M.Du. gheest, Ger. Geist "spirit, ghost"), from PIE base *ghois- "to be excited, frightened" (cf. Skt. hedah "wrath;" Avestan zaesha- "horrible, frightful;" Goth. usgaisjan, O.E. gæstan "to frighten"). This

EXPAND

was the usual W.Gmc. word for "supernatural being," and the primary sense seems to have been connected to the idea of "to wound, tear, pull to pieces." The surviving O.E. senses, however, are in Christian writing, where it is used to render L. spiritus, a sense preserved in Holy Ghost. Modern sense of "disembodied spirit of a dead person" is attested from c.1385 and returns the word toward its ancient sense. Most IE words for "soul, spirit" also double with ref. to supernatural spirits. Many have a base sense of "appearance" (e.g. Gk. phantasma; Fr. spectre; Pol. widmo, from O.C.S. videti "to see;" O.E. scin, O.H.G. giskin, originally "appearance, apparition," related to O.E. scinan, O.H.G. skinan "to shine"). Other concepts are in Fr. revenant, lit. "returning" (from the other world), O.N. aptr-ganga, lit. "back-comer." Bret. bugelnoz is lit. "night-child." L. manes, lit. "the good ones," is a euphemism. The gh- spelling appeared c.1425 in Caxton, influenced by Flem. and M.Du. gheest, but was rare in Eng. before c.1550. Sense of "slight suggestion" (in ghost image, ghost of a chance, etc.) is first recorded 1613; that in ghost writing is from 1884, but that term is not found until 1927. Ghost town is from 1931. Ghost in the machine was Gilbert Ryle's term (1949) for "the mind viewed as separate from the body."

COLLAPSE

Slang Dictionary

ghost (so) definition

tv.
to kill someone. : Mooshoo threatened to ghost the guy.

Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill.
Cite This Source

FOLDOC

Computing Dictionary

ghost definition

chat
(Or "zombie") The image of a user's session on IRC and similar systems, left when the session has been terminated (properly or, often, improperly) but the server (or the network at large) believes the connection is still active and belongs to a real user.
Compare clonebot.
(1997-04-07)

Easton

Bible Dictionary

Ghost definition

an old Saxon word equivalent to soul or spirit. It is the translation of the Hebrew _nephesh_ and the Greek _pneuma_, both meaning "breath," "life," "spirit," the "living principle" (Job 11:20; Jer. 15:9; Matt. 27:50; John 19:30). The expression "to give up the ghost" means to die (Lam. 1:19; Gen. 25:17; 35:29; 49:33; Job 3:11). (See HOLY GHOST.)

Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary
Cite This Source

American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

ghost

In addition to the idiom beginning with ghost, also see Chinaman's (ghost of a) chance; give up the ghost.