Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Biology The outer portion of the continuous phase of cytoplasm of a cell, sometimes distinguishable as a somewhat rigid, gelled layer beneath the cell membrane.
  • noun The visible substance believed to emanate from the body of a spiritualistic medium during communication with the dead.
  • noun The substance believed to be the transparent corporeal presence of a spirit or ghost.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In zoology, the exterior protoplasm or sarcode of a cell; the ectosarc: applied to the denser exterior substance of infusorians and other unicellular organisms, or of a free protoplasmic body, as a zoöspore.
  • noun In botany, the outer hyaline layer or film of the protoplasmic mass within a cell.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The outer transparent layer of protoplasm in a developing ovum.
  • noun The outer hyaline layer of protoplasm in a vegetable cell.
  • noun The ectosarc of protozoan.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun parapsychology The visible substance believed to emanate from the body of a spiritualistic medium during communication with the dead.
  • noun parapsychology An immaterial or ethereal substance, especially the transparent corporeal presence of a spirit or ghost.
  • noun cytology The outer granule-free layer of cytoplasm.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the outer granule-free layer of cytoplasm
  • noun (spiritualism) a substance supposed to emanate from the body of the medium during a trance

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

ecto- +‎ plasm

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Examples

  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Schrenk-Notzing, Charles Richet (who coined the word ectoplasm) plus numerous other investigators worldwide spent extensive time and money analyzing the exploits of many channellers and mediums.

    Dan Aykroyd: About Ghosts 2009

  • Most engineers are right-handed, and the brain ectoplasm seeps across into the writing: we find that “experimentalists” on the one hand, and “metrical-obsessives’, on the other (hand), are almost always right-handed.

    By the Numbers : Christian Bök : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007

  • Eva C Carriere, a medium who had originally used her real name, Marthe Beraud, until she was exposed, claimed to be able to produce large quantities of a strange, otherworldly substance called ectoplasm, which was thought to be produced by the bioenergy of the spirits.

    The Secret Life of Houdini William Kalush 2006

  • Eva C Carriere, a medium who had originally used her real name, Marthe Beraud, until she was exposed, claimed to be able to produce large quantities of a strange, otherworldly substance called ectoplasm, which was thought to be produced by the bioenergy of the spirits.

    The Secret Life of Houdini William Kalush 2006

  • Or it may take the more material form of the exudation of a strange white evanescent dough-like substance called the ectoplasm, which has been frequently photographed by scientific enquirers in different stages of its evolution, and which seems to possess an inherent quality of shaping itself into parts or the whole of a body, beginning in a putty-like mould and ending in a resemblance to perfect human members.

    The Vital Message 1919

  • Or it may take the more material form of the exudation of a strange white evanescent dough-like substance called the ectoplasm, which has been frequently photographed by scientific enquirers in different stages of its evolution, and which seems to possess an inherent quality of shaping itself into parts or the whole of a body, beginning in a putty-like mould and ending in a resemblance to perfect human members.

    The Vital Message Arthur Conan Doyle 1894

  • Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves 'heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.

    Spook by Mary Roach: Book summary 2010

  • Burroughs is fond too of the word "ectoplasm," and the beings that surround Lee, particularly the inimical ones, seem ectoplasmic phantoms projected on the wide screen of his consciousness from a mass séance.

    Déjeuner sur l'Herbe McCarthy, Mary 1963

  • You know that there was something like 100,000 Jewish survivors (scroll down to 1946) after world war two but that now there are 350,000 of them because they are reproducing through some kind of ectoplasm precipitation process.

    WHAT REALLY HAPPENED 2009

  • (One of my sons considered "ectoplasm" the ugliest word he knew.)

    The Globe and Mail - Home RSS feed 2009

Comments

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  • ''I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.''

    - Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)

    January 21, 2007

  • "He informed me that he was in the 'artistic game', and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson's mother which hovered like a ectoplasm on the wall." - F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

    June 13, 2008

  • An armchair with stuffing coming out like ectoplasm. From "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan.

    March 27, 2012