wraith

What it means

1. A ghost or specter, especially a person's likeness seen just after their death.

   Like wraiths with the impediments of bodies they stumbled in the direction of Salthill faces.

   2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance, paperback edition, Fourth Estate, page 80

   1 more example

   We might indeed have been the wraiths of the departed dead upon the dead sea of that dying planet for all the sound or sign we made in passing.

   1912 February–July, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Under the Moons of Mars”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as “Sola Tells Me Her Story”, in A Princess of Mars, Chicago, Ill.: A[lexander] C[aldwell] McClurg & Co., October 1917, →OCLC, pages 159–160

In a sentence

We might indeed have been the wraiths of the departed dead upon the dead sea of that dying planet for all the sound or sign we made in passing.

1912 February–July, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Under the Moons of Mars”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as “Sola Tells Me Her Story”, in A Princess of Mars, Chicago, Ill.: A[lexander] C[aldwell] McClurg & Co., October 1917, →OCLC, pages 159–160

Where it comes from

1. Middle Scotswraith
2. Englishwraith

Borrowed from Middle Scots wraith, first attested in 1513 in a translation of the Aeneid. The word has no certain etymology; it may be a transferred use of Middle Scots wraith, wrath (nominally "anger, rage", adjectivally "angry, wrathful"), thus connecting it to writhe and making it a doublet of wrath and wroth. The old Century Dictionary compares Old Norse vǫrðr (“guardian”).