Where does the word “spooky” come from?

A wind moved in the other night as my dog, Hugo, and I walked beneath towering oaks along a street lit only dimly from the lights from homes across long lawns. 

Spooky, I shuddered.

Halloween is already next week. I have a milestone birthday the day after. The election is on our heels. And I could have sworn Hugo did his business right by these leaves. Why can’t I find it?

Spooky.

Which conjures up our etymological, spookological subject for this post. What is the origin of the word spooky?

Spooky: relatively young and Dutch

The word spooky, meaning “eerie, uncanny, mysterious,” is younger than I guessed. According to current findings, the first known record of the word dates back only to 1854. 

The Oxford English Dictionary cites it in the Wide West, a newspaper that ran out of San Francisco: “After threading many dark passages, the guide, having unlocked all sorts of ‘spooky’ looking iron doors, … ushered us before the tomb.”

Spooky combines spook and the suffix -y, very much alive in the English language, as you may have recently seen in my generous employment of it in descriptions of gourds. So, spooky is literally “like a spook,” that is, a ghost, specter, or apparition. (In this post, I won’t go into other, later evolutions of spook, including as a slang term for a “spy” and, of course, the racial slur, which has a complicated history beyond my scope here.)

Spook is also younger than I would have guessed. So far, it’s first attested in 1801—and this is where this “ghost” story turns a shade more spoopy than spooky. That year, spook appeared in a humorous love poem circulated in several New England newspapers, including the Massachusetts Spy, a Boston publication that captured our first-known evidence of stevedore, which I recently covered.

The poem, called “Hans’ Letter to Notchie,” is credited to “an old Dutch man in Albany.” In it, our Hans expresses, in a kind of English doggerel with a comical Dutch accent, how he pines for his love, Notchie, but fears some Yankee will steal her away:

I fare zum Yankee vull of art,
More cunning as de very deel,
Vil get away yourn little hart,
Zo as da mill our horshes steal.

Hans goes on to put this Yankee—early on, an English-speaking resident of Connecticut—on notice, threatening to hitch his wagon and chase him quickly: “I fly zo swift as any spook.” That is, he’ll speed as fast as a ghost.

(Douglas Harper, who runs the excellent resource Etymonline.com, did a deep dive on the word spook, as did folklore professor Stephen Olbrys Gencarella on the concept of spookiness in an article in a very real journal, Supernatural Studies. I credit both of them for my research trail here.)  

Spook is indeed a Dutch word. It means, as so borrowed into English, “ghost, specter,” and has a number of cognates across the Germanic languages, most directly referring to spirits and phantoms in some way. After all, the Dutch colonized New York, home to our Hans and possible pathway of spook into English.

What’s behind the word haunt? It may already be … inside the “house”!

The German relative of the Dutch spook is Spuk, which may have influenced the English spook or been a separate borrowing via German-speaking immigrants from the historical Rhineland, whose descendants include the Pennsylvania Dutch and who speak a German dialect of the same name. 

Efforts have been made to relate a common Germanic source of spook to other Indo-European languages, but those connections are tenuous, insubstantial, shadowy—ghostlike, you could say. Otherwise, etymologies surrender up the deeper roots of spook to the beyond. The origin of spooky: obscure and unknown?! How fittingly spooky.

Spooky may be all about the sound

Unknown? Not quite, says Anatoly Liberman, who may have had Hans hold his horses. Liberman, a linguist and actual etymologist as far as any are extant anymore, has a penchant for tackling words whose origins have been written off to obscurity. He isn’t shy to issue his verdict on spook. 

“Spook is, rather obviously, an invented word for a goblin. Sp– attaches itself easily to expressive words,” he writes.

For sp–, he cites speak, spill, spit, spew, spark, spat, “and the rest” of a large group of words that begin with this consonant cluster in a kind of imitation of variously ejective bursts, apparently.

He continues: “With all the diffidence required in such situations, I would like to suggest that spook is a noun, whose form was meant to frighten, and the frightening part was sp-.” 

There’s something to Liberman’s idea. In German, Spuk today primarily refers to “a haunting” or “ghost,” but it once also carried such senses as “racket, to-do, palaver.” And the Danish cognate to spook, spøg, means “joke”—perhaps with some original sense of something startling and tricksome, like a prankish puck? 

Speaking of puck, Liberman holds up the possibility that spook could be related in some way to puck, “a mischievous or evil sprite,” immortally figured in the character of Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Puck comes from an Old English word for “goblin,” with a cousin in Old Norse.

Liberman concludes, drolly, that his suggestion is just that. He is also, of course, very aware of the conventional rooting of spook in Dutch.  But he adds that the Dutch vowel in spook is different from than in English, and if so borrowed from Holland’s tongue, must have been from books, not speech, else the Dutch spook would have become spoke. Liberman also observes that Dutch words in English—and there are many—are loaned much earlier than the 1800s.

Interested in some more English words with Dutch origins? My archives have you covered, like a white sheet for a ghost costume. Check out my old posts on aardvark, bully, filibuster, furlough, loiter, and trade.

Verb forms of spook date back to at least the late 1800s. Spookily, 1955. And spooky season? Well, this appellation for the advent of autumn ahead of Halloween—which I would define as cozy with a dash of uncanny—is much older than I would have guessed. Evidence for it dates back to the early 1900s, though early use of spooky in the phrase signified sentiments far more supernatural than they do now, where the increasingly common expression today, to me, skews cutesy and commercial—though oh-so fun to say.

***

I didn’t need The X-Files’ own “Spooky” Mulder to help me find Hugo’s evasive excrement.

I flicked on my phone’s flashlight and ghost-poo-hunted until I realized, looking up from scrolling, he had only been sniffing and piddling. Hugo later confirmed this, I assure you, neighbors, in some subsequent spooky action at a distance, shall we say. 

Now, if I could only find where the time goes. That’s spooky.