Hogwarts

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The famous fictional boarding school for young witches and wizards in the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling, set in a castle in Scotland
2. A magical fictional academy in the Harry Potter series where young students learn spells, potions, and other arts of wizardry in a Scottish castle
3. The imaginary wizarding school featured in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, attended by children who study magic at an old castle in the Scottish Highlands

Etymology: Most readers assume the name comes from a wizard's school of myth, but its first appearance is in a 1953 comic novel about an English schoolboy. Geoffrey Willans's "Down With Skool" mentions "The Hogwarts," a fictitious play attributed to a schoolboy named Marcus Plautus Molesworthus. J. K. Rowling has read the book, and when she reused the name in her 1997 novel "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," it became the school at the centre of the series. Rowling has speculated that she may have absorbed the word subconsciously from hogwort, a plant she noticed while walking around Kew Gardens. Within the novels, the name is read as a plain compound of "hog" and "warts," as in "warthog," and the Pottermore article gives a more whimsical version: Rowena Ravenclaw supposedly named the school after dreaming of a warty hog that led her to a cliff by a lake, though the article admits it is unknown whether this is true.