spirit

Before spirit became something that could haunt a hallway or lift a team’s morale, it was simply breath—the invisible puff proving that a body was alive. Latin speakers used spīritus for breathing, wind, and eventually the animating force within a person; Christian writers then used it to translate Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruah in biblical passages. English borrowed it through Old French espirit in the Middle Ages, while its Germanic cousin gast eventually gave us ghost—so spirit and ghost became rival English labels for the unseen. The same breath also hides inside inspire: to inspire someone was, quite literally, to breathe into them, as though an idea arrived on a gust of divine air. By the 1670s, spirits could even mean strong liquor, probably because alcohol was a volatile substance that seemed to carry its own invisible life-force; every “spirit” today still whispers the old question: is it breath, soul, courage—or merely something evaporating from a glass?