Vathek

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A Gothic tale written by William Beckford in the 1780s about a debauched caliph ; the ruler at the center of that story, famed for his insatiable appetites and cruelty
2. The sensational Gothic novel published by William Beckford in the eighteenth century ; the wicked, self-indulgent caliph who is its protagonist
3. An eighteenth-century Oriental Gothic romance by William Beckford ; the title figure, a tyrannical and sensual ruler who pursues forbidden knowledge

Etymology: Vathek is the name of a fictional caliph, and the word's history runs through a single 18th-century author. William Beckford, a wealthy English writer, composed "Vathek" in French in 1782 in a few days of furious work, and it was published in English translation in 1786. The name itself appears to be a Persian-derived royal title, "Vāthiq," meaning "one who holds fast" or "the firm," and Beckford borrowed it for the caliph of his Gothic oriental tale. The book's fame was so great that the name stuck to the story and later to its title character, and the word now refers to that tale and its wicked ruler, not to any historical figure. Because the caliph was a real ruler's name in the Abbasid tradition, Beckford's choice drew on genuine Islamic history, though the character himself is pure invention. Beckford's novel is a gleefully excessive tale of a tyrant who sells his soul for forbidden knowledge, and its lush orientalism made the name a byword for that style of decadent Gothic fiction.