2001/09/19 revenant \REV-uh-nuhnt\, noun: One who returns after death

Word of the Day for Monday, September 19, 2011
revenant \REV-uh-nuhnt\, noun:
One who returns after death (as a ghost) or after a long absence.
Lazarus, as a revenant, is often used by the religious romance-writers of the middle ages as a vehicle for their conceptions of the lower world.
-- R. C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord
He pale, immobile like a revenant himself, looked sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes.
-- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
The folklore of the Irish countryside too, with its hauntings, revenants and changelings... was an integral part of everyday awareness, even in the middle-class world of Yeats's childhood.
-- Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats