Demon

How to spell demon

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce demon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does demon mean?

1. nounAn evil spirit or malevolent supernatural being.
2. nounA persistent inner torment, addiction, or driving compulsion.

Demon in a sentence

• The horror film featured a demon that haunted an old farmhouse.

• He finally confronted the demon of his gambling habit.

• Ancient texts describe rituals meant to drive out a demon.

• Writing the memoir helped her face an old demon from her past.

Where does demon come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the ancient Greek daimon, which originally meant a divine power, a guiding spirit, or a lesser deity, with no hint of evil about it; a person's daimon was something like an inner guardian or destiny. Latin took it up as daemon, still a neutral spirit, but early Christian writers narrowed the sense, treating these pagan spirits as malevolent beings and so attaching the idea of wickedness that we now take for granted. English borrowed the word in the medieval period through Latin, and you can still see the older spelling in the variant 'daemon', which is why the modern 'demon' is sometimes mistakenly given an extra letter. The same Greek root survives in 'pandemonium', literally a place of all the demons, a word coined by Milton. The shift from a friendly guiding spirit to a figure of horror is one of the more dramatic meaning changes in English vocabulary.

How the word is built

• demon (from Greek daimon: a divine power or spirit); a single root with no prefix or suffix