Cambion

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The offspring produced by a demon and a human parent, typically depicted in folklore and mythology as a hybrid being
2. A creature born from the union of a human and a demonic entity, often portrayed in fantasy literature and occult traditions
3. A hybrid offspring resulting from the mating of a demon with a person, featured in various mythological and fantastical accounts

Etymology: "Cambion" is a word for the offspring of a demon and a human, a figure from medieval demonology. Its ancestor is the Late Latin verb "cambio", meaning "I exchange", and the link lies in the old folk belief that such a child was a substitute left in place of a human baby. The idea was that a demon had swapped the real infant for its own, so the child was, in effect, an exchanged one. The word is a doublet of "change", meaning the two English words descend from the same Latin root but arrived by different routes. "Change" came into English through Old French, where the root had softened into forms that gave rise to words like "changer", and it took on the everyday senses of alteration and exchange. "Cambion" came more directly from the Latin, keeping the sense of barter or swap that the Latin verb carried, and it stayed a specialist term of learned or literary demonology rather than a common word.