Web 2.0 → Homepage → ghost

ghost

Ghost Ghost (g[=o]st), n. [OE. gast, gost, soul, spirit, AS. g[=a]st breath, spirit, soul; akin to OS. g[=e]st spirit, soul, D. geest, G. geist, and prob. to E. gaze, ghastly.] [1913 Webster] 1. The spirit; the soul of man. [Obs.] [1913 Webster]

Then gives her grieved ghost thus to lament. --Spenser. [1913 Webster]

2. The disembodied soul; the soul or spirit of a deceased person; a spirit appearing after death; an apparition; a specter. [1913 Webster]

The mighty ghosts of our great Harrys rose. --Shak. [1913 Webster]

I thought that I had died in sleep, And was a blessed ghost. --Coleridge. [1913 Webster]

3. Any faint shadowy semblance; an unsubstantial image; a phantom; a glimmering; as, not a ghost of a chance; the ghost of an idea. [1913 Webster]

Each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. --Poe. [1913 Webster]

4. A false image formed in a telescope by reflection from the surfaces of one or more lenses. [1913 Webster]

{Ghost moth} (Zo["o]l.), a large European moth ({Hepialus humuli}); so called from the white color of the male, and the peculiar hovering flight; -- called also {great swift}.

{Holy Ghost}, the Holy Spirit; the Paraclete; the Comforter; (Theol.) the third person in the Trinity.

{To give up the ghost} or {To yield up the ghost}, to die; to expire. [1913 Webster]

And he gave up the ghost full softly. --Chaucer. [1913 Webster]

Jacob . . . yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people. --Gen. xlix. 33. [1913 Webster]

Ghost Ghost, v. i. To die; to expire. [Obs.] --Sir P. Sidney. [1913 Webster]

Ghost Ghost, v. t. To appear to or haunt in the form of an apparition. [Obs.] --Shak. [1913 Webster]

Ghost dance Ghost dance A religious dance of the North American Indians, participated in by both sexes, and looked upon as a rite of invocation the purpose of which is, through trance and vision, to bring the dancer into communion with the unseen world and the spirits of departed friends. The dance is the chief rite of the

Ghost-dance, or

Messiah,

religion, which originated about 1890 in the doctrines of the Piute Wovoka, the Indian Messiah, who taught that the time was drawing near when the whole Indian race, the dead with the living, should be reunited to live a life of millennial happiness upon a regenerated earth. The religion inculcates peace, righteousness, and work, and holds that in good time, without warlike intervention, the oppressive white rule will be removed by the higher powers. The religion spread through a majority of the western tribes of the United States, only in the case of the Sioux, owing to local causes, leading to an outbreak. [Webster 1913 Suppl.]