ghost

Plural: ghosts

Noun

• a mental representation of some haunting experience
  • "he looked like he had seen a ghost"
• a writer who gives the credit of authorship to someone else
• the visible disembodied soul of a dead person
• a suggestion of some quality
  • "he detected a ghost of a smile on her face"
• A disembodied soul; a soul or spirit of a deceased person; a spirit appearing after death.
• A spirit; a human soul.
• Any faint shadowy semblance; an unsubstantial image.
• A false image formed in a telescope, camera, or other optical device by reflection from the surfaces of one or more lenses.
• An unwanted image similar to and overlapping or adjacent to the main one on a television screen, caused by the transmitted image being received both directly and via reflection.
• Ellipsis of ghostwriter.
• A nonexistent person invented to obtain some (typically fraudulent) benefit.
• A dead person whose identity is stolen by another (see ghosting).
• An unresponsive user on IRC, resulting from the user's client disconnecting without notifying the server.
• A copy of a file or record.
• An understudy.
• A covert (and deniable) agent.
• A faint image that remains after an attempt to remove graffiti.
• An opponent in a racing game that follows a previously recorded route, allowing players to compete against previous best times.
• Someone whose identity cannot be established because there are no records of such a person.
• An unphysical state in a gauge theory.
• A formerly nonexistent character that was at some point mistakenly encoded into a character set standard, which might have since become used opportunistically for some genuine purpose.
• Ellipsis of ghost pepper.
• A game in which players take turns to add a letter to a possible word, trying not to complete a word.
• White or pale.
• Transparent or translucent.
• Abandoned.
• Remnant; remains of a(n).
• Perceived or listed but not real.
• Of cryptid, supernatural or extraterrestrial nature.
• Substitute.

Verb

Verb Forms: ghosted, ghosting, ghosts

• To haunt or appear as a phantom.
• move like a ghost
  • "The masked men ghosted across the moonlit yard"
• haunt like a ghost; pursue
• write for someone else
  • "How many books have you ghostwritten so far?"
• To haunt; to appear to in the form of an apparition.
• To die; to expire.
• To imbue with a ghost-like hue or effect.
• To ghostwrite.
• To sail seemingly without wind.
• To copy a file or record.
• To gray out (a visual item) to indicate that it is unavailable.
• To forcibly disconnect an IRC user who is using one's reserved nickname.
• To appear or move without warning, quickly and quietly; to slip.
• To transfer (a prisoner) to another prison without the prior knowledge of other inmates.
• To kill.
• To perform an act of ghosting: to break up with someone without warning or explanation; to ignore someone, especially on social media.
• To provide the speaking or singing voice for another actor, who is lip-syncing.

Adj

• Gone; absent; not present or involved.

Examples

• Everyone believed that the ghost of an old lady haunted the crypt.
• ghost ant
• ghost apples (a thin layer of ice in the shape of an apple, which forms around it and is left behind when the apple rots and falls out)
• ghost catfish
• ghost cell
• ghost cellphone vibration
• ghost craters (craters that have been filled, e.g. with volcanic deposits)
• ghost deer
• ghost fossils (impressions of things like shells that remain in the rock after the shell etc dissolves)
• ghost image
• ghost island
• ghost pain
• ghost rocket
• ghost ship
• ghost singer
• ghost slug
• ghost town
• ghost voter
• ghost writer
• ghostflower
• He believes in ghosts.
• He tried to GHOST the winning word, hoping his opponent wouldn’t notice the triple word score.
• I've written both as a ghost for experts and under my name.
• not a ghost of a chance
• the ghost of an idea
• 彁 is a ghost character from the Japanese JIS X 0208 character set.

Synonyms

ghostwrite, ghostwriter, haunt, obsess, shade, specter, spectre, spook, touch, trace, wraith, apparition, backup, barghest, bogey, duppy, echo, eidolon, empuse, essence, ghost, glimmer, glimmering, glimpse, haint, hint, inkling, jumbie, phantom, poltergeist, revenant, shadow, soul, spark, spirit, sprite, spy, suggestion, visitant

Related Words

Spiritism, apparition, banshee, barghest, bogeyman, boggart, bogie, channelling, chimera, demon, doppelganger, draugr, duppy, ectoplasm, eidolon, exorcism, fantom, fetch, ghostly, ghoul, haint, hallucination, haunt, ignore, illusion, incubus, lamia, larva, lemur, manes, mare, medium, mirage, monstrous, necromancy, nightmare, phantasm, phantom, poltergeist, revenant, shade, shadow, soul, specter, spectre, spirit, spook, sprite, things that go bump in the night, vampire, visitant, wendigo, wight, will-o'-the-wisp, wraith, zombie

Anagrams of ghost