Draug

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A restless undead creature of Scandinavian folklore, often imagined as the ghost of a drowned sailor haunting the sea
2. A spectral being from Norse and Faroese legend, typically a corpse that lingers near the shore or coast to torment the living
3. In Scandinavian myth, the animated corpse of a dead seafarer that returns from the waves to bring misfortune upon people

Etymology: Draug is a spelling variant of "draugr", the Old Norse word for a revenant: a dead man who stays in his burial mound, or walks abroad, to guard his treasure and harass the living. The word is a loan into English from Old Norse, used mainly in discussions of Scandinavian folklore and the sagas, where the figure is a restless corpse rather than the ghost of a gentler kind. The spelling without the final "r" is the less common form in English. The "r" in the fuller form belongs to the Old Norse nominative ending, which is commonly dropped when the word is adapted into English, so the shorter spelling is a natural product of that dropping rather than a separate word.

Synonyms: draugr, revenant