Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun In Jewish folklore, the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls his or her behavior.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Jewish folklore) the wandering soul of a dead person, or a demon, that enters the body of a living person and controls that body's behavior. It may be exorcised by religious rites.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
malicious possessing spirit , believed to be thedislocated soul of adead person .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (Jewish folklore) a demon that enters the body of a living person and controls that body's behavior
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word dybbuk.
Examples
-
The wife replies that her husband is mistaken, the relative has been dead for three years, and what her husband saw was a dybbuk a Yiddish word used in this context to mean “evil spirit”.
-
The surname, Dibbuk, refers to the Yiddish word dybbuk that the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as "a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person."
Walter Mosley 2008
-
A dybbuk is the spirit of a dead man that enters the body of another living being and possesses it.
The Killing Kind John Connolly 2002
-
"Just as the dybbuk is a confrontation between two identities within the same person, the dybbuk's outburst reflects a confrontation between the center and the periphery and a confrontation between cultures, East and West," she explains.
San Francisco Sentinel The San Francisco Sentinel 2010
-
According to the kabbalist concept, the dybbuk is a soul - in most cases of a sinner - that has not found a home (it is in a liminal state) either in heaven or in hell.
San Francisco Sentinel The San Francisco Sentinel 2010
-
Why else does the film begin with a hilarious but troubling parable about an ancient rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) who may or may not be inhabited by a wandering lost soul known as a dybbuk?
-
Why else does the film begin with a hilarious but troubling parable about an ancient rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) who may or may not be inhabited by a wandering lost soul known as a dybbuk?
-
In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk is a demonic spirit that inhabits a dead person.
-
Why else does the film begin with a hilarious but troubling parable about an ancient rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) who may or may not be inhabited by a wandering lost soul known as a dybbuk?
-
He himself was almost in the grip of a 'dybbuk' of documentation.
San Francisco Sentinel The San Francisco Sentinel 2010
oroboros commented on the word dybbuk
According to Chris Cole in Wordplay, the common word of length 6 with the most infrequently used letters.
June 1, 2008
bilby commented on the word dybbuk
Common? Matter of opinion. I wouldn't classify it as an English word at all.
March 15, 2009
kneedeep commented on the word dybbuk
Is the pronunciation "Dib - buck" or "die - buek" ?
Even if it isn't technically English, it's still a fun word.
April 30, 2009
madmouth commented on the word dybbuk
Like 'dibbick'. An example from a fictional drama title: Dybbuck Schybbuck; I said we need more ham! (-Eugene Levy)
April 30, 2009