Meaning

noun a mental representation of some haunting experience

noun a writer who gives the credit of authorship to someone else

noun the visible disembodied soul of a dead person

originThe noun is derived from Middle English gost, from Old English gāst, gǣst (“breath, spirit, soul, ghost”) (compare modern English Holy Ghost), from Proto-West Germanic *gaist, from Proto-Germanic *gaistaz, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰéysdos, from *ǵʰéysd- (“anger, agitation”). The h in the spelling appears in the Prologue to William Caxton’s Royal Book, printed in 1484, in a reference to the…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0