Etymology

hauntology

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Today it means: A concept involving the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past. Full definition →

French hantologie
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The story

  1. French · borrowed fromhantologie
  2. English todayhauntology

Borrowed from French hantologie: equivalent to haunt + -ology, and a near-homophone to ontologie (“ontology”); apparently coined by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.