"empusa" meaning in English

See empusa in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: empusas [plural], empusae [plural], empousa [alternative], empuse [alternative]
Etymology: Ancient Greek Ἔμπουσα (Émpousa) Etymology templates: {{uder|en|grc|Ἔμπουσα}} Ancient Greek Ἔμπουσα (Émpousa) Head templates: {{en-noun|s|empusae}} empusa (plural empusas or empusae)
  1. (Greek mythology) In Ancient Greek mythology, a kind of spectre sent by Hecate to guard roads and devour travellers. Wikipedia link: empusa Tags: Greek Categories (topical): Greek mythology Related terms: lamia, mormo Translations (kind of spectre in Greek mythology): Empousa [feminine] (French), Empuse [feminine] (French), Empusa [masculine] (German)

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

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        {
          "text": "1858, \"Empūsa\", entry in William Smith, A Classical Dictionary of Biography, Mythology, and Geography, John Murray, page 240,\nThe Lamiae and Mormolyceia, who assumed the form of handsome women for the purpose of attracting young men, and then sucked their blood like vampyrs and ate their flesh, were reckoned among the Empusae."
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Heide Crawford, The Origins of the Literary Vampire, Rowman & Littlefield, page 41:",
          "text": "The empusae of Greek mythology demonstrate physical animal traits of the donkey and the female dog in order to emphasize certain negative characteristics associated with these animals in mythology that can also be applied to human beings.",
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        }
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        ],
        [
          "Hecate",
          "Hecate"
        ],
        [
          "guard",
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        ],
        [
          "road",
          "road"
        ],
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          "devour",
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        ],
        [
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        ]
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        "(Greek mythology) In Ancient Greek mythology, a kind of spectre sent by Hecate to guard roads and devour travellers."
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          "sense": "kind of spectre in Greek mythology",
          "tags": [
            "feminine"
          ],
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        },
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        ],
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          "guard",
          "guard"
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          "devour",
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        "feminine"
      ],
      "word": "Empousa"
    },
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      ],
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    },
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      "word": "Empusa"
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}

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-04-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-04-03 using wiktextract (8c1bb29 and fb63907). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.