boggart

English

Etymology

As a monster that feeds on fear, coined by British novelist J. K. Rowling in 1999 in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Noun

boggart (plural boggarts)

  1. Alternative spelling of boggard (A bogey, a ghost)
    • 1787, William Collins, “Song XXV: A Lancaſhire Farmer's deſcription of an Earthquake”, in The New Vocal Miscellany, or, A Fountain of Pure Harmony; Containing Sixty New Songs, page 32:
      OH! Maeſter—ſtrange things late I've ſeen— / And oft has boggart-haunted been ! / I'm ſure I's falt when ſtory's-tauld, / 'Till blude run aw' through veins ſo cauld !
    • 1821, Lee Gibbons, chapter III, in The Cavalier, volume II, page 48:
      “ […] Are na ye shamed, ye weak gawly, that ye darena stir ower the threshold for fear of a boggart?”
    • 1897 August, Harwood Brierley, “The Swale and Its Waterfalts”, in Sylvanus Urban, editor, The Gentleman's Magazine, volume CCLXXXIII, page 191:
      Hoggart's Leap is a weird name, suggesting to the uninitiated some connection with a local tradition and a boggart or a barguest of Swaledale renown ; but I believe that Hoggart is really a family name, there being Hoggarth's Farm about two miles further up the Swale.
    • 1898 December, George Morley, “The Sleeping Beauty. A Woodlander's Adventure”, in Sylvanus Urban, editor, The Gentleman's Magazine, volume CCLXXXV, The Verger and the Woodman, page 532:
      […] but when it came to a question of standing up against the boggart of Arden—a thing, in the popular imagination, composed of neither flesh, blood, nor bones—even a physical giant had qualms and misgivings, and so had Joseph Wand.
  2. (fantasy) A shapeshifting monster that feeds on fear.
    • 2018 June 5, Jim Butcher, Brief Cases: The Dresden Files, Hachette UK, →ISBN:
      "A boogeyman," I said. "Sometimes known as a boggle or a boggart. It's a weak form of phobophage - a fear-eater, mostly insubstantial."
    • 2019 March 25, Autumn Reed, Touch of Wrath, Autumn Reed:
      I pushed open the lid, half-expecting a Boggart to burst out of the trunk, taking the form of my worst nightmare.
    • 2021 April 27, C. T. Phipps, Michael Suttkus, A Nightmare on Elk Street, Crossroad Press:
      The boggart has brought you here because it hopes to feed off you like it has been trying to feed off me.

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