Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An apparition of someone that is believed to appear as a portent just before that person's death.
- noun The ghost of a dead person.
- noun Something faint or insubstantial.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An apparition in the exact likeness of a person, supposed to be seen before or soon after the person's death; in general, a visible spirit; a specter; a ghost.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Scot. An apparition of a person in his exact likeness, seen before death, or a little after; hence, an apparition; a specter; a vision; an unreal image.
- noun Sometimes, improperly, a spirit thought to preside over the waters; -- called also
water wraith .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
ghost orspecter , especially seen just after a person's death.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a mental representation of some haunting experience
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience.
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It is not her own betrothal, but mine with Winnie's wraith, that is deluding her crazy brain.
Aylwin Theodore Watts-Dunton 1873
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* This in the North of Ireland is called wraith, as in
The Ned M'Keown Stories Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of William Carleton, Volume Three William Carleton 1831
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When next we see Dean, he is standing in the hallway, monitoring the mirror where he expects to see the true reflection of the wraith, which is the monster that’s been killing people.
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The 'wraith' of a small box whose image was out at the right, appeared above the other image off at the left and it was turned with a corner to the front.
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[1] The word "wraith" is here used in an obviously inexact sense; but the wraith seemed to be the nearest equivalent in English mythology to the Scandinavian "fylgie," an attendant spirit, often regarded as a sort of emanation from the person it accompanied, and sometimes (as in this case) typifying that person's moral attributes.
The Vikings of Helgeland The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. Henrik Ibsen 1867
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Those writers probably mean "wraith," a ghost or spectral figure seen by a dying person, though there will be no convincing them of that.
CJR Merrill Perlman 2009
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Those writers probably mean "wraith," a ghost or spectral figure seen by a dying person, though there will be no convincing them of that.
CJR 2009
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Loads of good stuff in there and a good post from 'wraith' a coupla pages back, too.
unknown title 2009
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Those writers probably mean "wraith," a ghost or spectral figure seen by a dying person, though there will be no convincing them of that.
CJR 2009
kewpid commented on the word wraith
“Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.�? — Vanishing Point, NYT
February 8, 2008
vanishedone commented on the word wraith
Vexamples has given up: She looked like a small white wraith--do you know what a wraith is?
It's interesting to see an etymology from the Century Dictionary; even the mighty O.E.D. just calls the word's origin 'obscure'.
December 10, 2009