| 1. | 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. |
| 2. | a mere shadow or semblance; a trace: He's a ghost of his former self. |
| 3. | a remote possibility: He hasn't a ghost of a chance. |
| 4. | (sometimes initial capital letter ) a spiritual being. |
| 5. | the principle of life; soul; spirit. |
| 6. | Informal. ghost writer. |
| 7. | a secondary image, esp. one appearing on a television screen as a white shadow, caused by poor or double reception or by a defect in the receiver. |
| 8. | 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. |
| 9. | 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 esp. for the purpose of manipulating funds or avoiding taxes: Investigation showed a payroll full of ghosts. |
| 14. | to ghostwrite (a book, speech, etc.). |
| 15. | to haunt. |
| 16. | Engraving. to lighten the background of (a photograph) before engraving. |
| 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, esp. as a way of manipulating funds. |
| 21. | fabricated for purposes of deception or fraud: We were making contributions to a ghost company. |
| 22. | give up the ghost,
|

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