ghoul
(guːl)
Also 8–9 goul(e, 9 gho(o)l, gho(u)le, g(h)owl.
[a. Arab. ghūl, from a verbal root meaning ‘to seize’.]
An evil spirit supposed (in Muslim countries) to rob graves and prey on human corpses.
| 1786 tr. Beckford's Vathek (1868) 71 All the stories of malignant Dives and dismal Goules thronged into her memory. 1817 Moore Lalla R., Veiled Proph. 114 No church-yard Ghole, caught lingering in the light Of the bless'd sun. 1870 Lowell Among my Bks. Ser. i. (1873) 84 It sucks with the vampire, gorges with the ghoule. |
| transf. and fig. 1812 Southey in Q. Rev. VII. 53 These human ghowls were not content..to let their friends die a natural death before they ate them. 1824 W. Irving T. Trav. I. 73 He was, in a manner, a literary goul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature. 1831 Carlyle Sart. Res. (1858) 180 Two immeasurable Phantoms, Hypocrisy and Atheism, with the Gowl, Sensuality, stalk abroad over the Earth. 1841 Lane Arab. Nts. I. 36 The term ‘Ghool’ is applied to any cannibal. 1855 Thackeray Newcomes I. 312 Ghouls feasting on the fresh corpse of a reputation. 1885 M. E. Braddon Wyllard's Weird I. iii. 95 What ghouls people must be to gloat over such a subject. |
b. attrib. and
Comb., as
ghoul-eye,
ghoul-head;
ghoul-haunted,
ghoul-like adjs.| 1844 Disraeli Coningsby viii. vi, Her natural pallor aggravated into a ghoul-like tint. a 1849 Poe Poems, Ulalume, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. 1858 G. Macdonald Phantastes vi. (1878) 104 His ghoul-eyes and his ghastly face fascinated me. 1884 J. Payne Tales fr. Arabic II. 280 She.. told him..that which had betided her with the Ghoul-head, whenas it appeared to her in the garden. 1896 Westm. Gaz. 26 May 8/1 The typhoid statistics of the Brisbane Hospital show a remarkable triumph of pioneering work in what the Sydney Herald calls the ‘ghoul-haunted swamps of medical conservatism’. |