Ghostly

How to spell ghostly

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ghostly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ghostly mean?

1. adjectiveResembling or suggesting a ghost; eerie, pale, and seeming to belong to another world.

Ghostly in a sentence

• A ghostly figure seemed to drift across the empty corridor.

• The abandoned mill had a ghostly silence after dark.

Where does ghostly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun 'gast', meaning breath, soul, or spirit, the same root that gives us 'ghost' itself. In its earliest English use the adjective 'gastlic' meant 'spiritual' or 'religious', so a 'ghostly father' was once simply a priest who cared for the soul. Over the centuries the sense narrowed and darkened, shifting from anything spiritual toward the specific idea of resembling a phantom: pale, eerie, and otherworldly. The puzzling silent 'h' in the spelling was not original; Old English had no 'h' there, but Flemish printers working in England during the late 1400s, including those around William Caxton's circle, inserted it (perhaps by analogy with Dutch 'gheest'), and the spelling stuck. That printer's flourish is exactly why the modern word traps writers: the 'gh' is heard as a plain hard 'g', so the silent 'h' must simply be remembered.

How the word is built

• ghost (spirit of the dead, from Old English gast)
• -ly (adjective-forming suffix meaning 'having the quality of')