Boggart

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A legendary entity in British mythology that changes shape to reflect an individual's deepest fears or serves to instill terror
2. A folklore spirit known for altering its appearance to embody what frightens a person most, often depicted as a trickster
3. A mythical being from British tales that morphs into forms representing a person's worst fears to scare them

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "boggart" is that its modern sense, a shape-shifting fear-feeder, is largely a twentieth-century idea. The older word was a variant of "boggard," a term recorded in English from the 18th century, and it belonged to the broader family of household spirits and bogeys that frightened children and rustics. The shape-shifting that now defines it was not its original trait. The word's fame in its current form comes from J. K. Rowling, who coined the monster's modern role in 1999 in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." In her books a boggart takes whatever form its victim fears most, so the monster becomes a kind of mirror for individual anxieties rather than a single fixed creature. That idea, a being that feeds on fear and takes the shape of the thing you dread, was her invention and gave the old dialect word a new and much wider life.