Wight definition: from ordinary person to undead spirit

Wight definition: three senses, oldest first

1. A living creature or being. In Old English, wiht could mean any creature, and even "something" or "anything."
2. A person, often an unlucky or pitied one. Older poems and plays speak of "a poor wight" or "a wretched wight," much as we might say "the poor fellow." Today this sounds deliberately old-fashioned or humorous.
3. An undead or ghostly creature. In modern fantasy novels, games and shows, a wight is a corpse-like being raised from the dead, often guarding a tomb or burial mound. This sense builds on an older Old English use for an uncanny, unnatural creature.

So what does wight mean today?

If you read the word in a fantasy story, it almost certainly means an undead monster. If you meet it in a poem or a novel set long ago, it usually means a person, often with a note of pity or gentle mockery. In ordinary conversation people hardly use it at all, unless they are joking in a mock-old style.

• The knight paused over the sleeping traveller and muttered, "Rest, weary wight."
• In the game's third level, a pack of wights rises from the frozen graves.
• My uncle calls anyone who misses the last bus "an unlucky wight."
• The tale warns children not to wander near the old mound, where a wight keeps watch.

Wight meaning in fantasy fiction

Fantasy writers like old Germanic words because they carry a sense of age and dread. A wight in these stories is usually:

• a dead body or spirit that has been brought back by dark magic
• cold, pale or skeletal, with a chilling touch
• tied to a place such as a barrow, tomb or frozen wasteland
• often pictured as more solid and dangerous than a drifting ghost

Each story sets its own rules, so one book's wights may be slow and mindless while another's are cunning. This sense is now the main reason people search to define wight. It sits well beside other creature and legend words such as chimera and the wider idea of lore.

A word that gave us naught and naughty

The Old English noun wiht meant a living being, a person, or simply a thing. It has relatives across the Germanic languages, such as German Wicht and Dutch wicht, a little child. Two common English words grew from it:

• aught, from Old English awiht, "ever a whit," meaning anything at all
• naught, from nawiht, "no whit," meaning nothing; from it came naughty, which first meant worthless and later bad or badly behaved

The word whit, as in "not a whit worried," is another form of the same word that changed its spelling over time. Where the Germanic word itself came from is less clear, and experts offer differing views.

Wight, white and the Isle of Wight

Writing "a white rose from the grave" when you mean the creature, or ordering "wight wine," is an easy slip because the two words sound identical.

Is it a good word for your essay?

Use wight when you want an old, storybook flavour or when you are writing fantasy. In a school essay, a work email or everyday chat, choose person, creature or ghost instead, unless you are quoting older literature. You can find more unusual and old vocabulary in our everyday vocabulary hub.