banshee

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 6, 2011 is: banshee • \BAN-shee\  • noun : a female spirit in Gaelic folklore whose appearance or wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die Examples: Barbara screamed like a banshee when she saw the spider slowly crawling up her leg. "Wednesday's audience howled like banshees." -- From a theater review by Chris Silk in Florida's Naples Daily News, April 8, 2011 Did you know? In Irish folklore, a "bean sidhe" (literally "woman of fairyland") was not a welcome guest. When she was seen combing her hair or heard wailing beneath a window, it was considered a sign that a family member was about to die. English speakers modified the mournful fairy's Irish name into the modern word "banshee" -- a term we now most often use to evoke her woeful or terrible or earsplitting cry, as in "to scream like a banshee," or attributively, "a banshee wail." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.