Since today is our last Wordplay Day before Halloween, today’s Scrabble blog post is devoted to words for ghosts. Four of the words are seven letters long, enabling you to Scrabble or bingo, earning you an additional fifty points for the play.
- banshee: a female spirit in Gaelic folklore that wails to warn of a family member’s imminent death.
- barguest: a goblin (also barghest)
- bogy: a goblin
- daimon: a spirit (also daemon and demon)
- eidolon: a phantom or specter
- fairyism: the quality of being like a fairy (not really a ghost but a great word)
- haint: a ghost
- kelpie: a water sprite in Scottish folklore known for drowning sailors
- wraith: a ghost of a person, often appearing just before that person’s death
- zombi: a zombie (zombify and zombification are both playable but not to be confused with zombiism, a West African and Haitiian belief system involving a rainbow serpent. See Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow).
Jane Lucas 