Word of the Day

: June 6, 2011

banshee

noun BAN-shee

What It Means

: a female spirit in Gaelic folklore whose appearance or wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die

banshee in Context

Barbara screamed like a banshee when she saw the spider slowly crawling up her leg.

"Wednesday's audience howled like banshees." -- From a theater review by Chris Silk in Florida's Naples Daily News, April 8, 2011

Did You Know?

In Irish folklore, a "bean sidhe" (literally "woman of fairyland") was not a welcome guest. When she was seen combing her hair or heard wailing beneath a window, it was considered a sign that a family member was about to die. English speakers modified the mournful fairy's Irish name into the modern word "banshee" -- a term we now most often use to evoke her woeful or terrible or earsplitting cry, as in "to scream like a banshee," or attributively, "a banshee wail."