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OneKitly

wraith

nounattested in dialogue

  • //ɹeɪθ//

A ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.

noun

  1. 1

    A ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.

    We might indeed have been the wraiths of the departed dead upon the dead sea of that dying planet for all the sound or sign we made in passing.

    Like wraiths with the impediments of bodies they stumbled in the direction of Salthill faces.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle Scots wraith, first attested in 1513 in a translation of the Aeneid. The word has no certain etymology; it may be a transferred use of Middle Scots wraith, wrath (nominally "anger, rage", adjectivally "angry, wrathful"), thus connecting it to writhe and making it a doublet of wrath and wroth. The old Century Dictionary compares Old Norse vǫrðr (“guardian”).

Forms

plural
wraiths
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).