Word of the Day
: October 31, 2025hobgoblin
playWhat It Means
A hobgoblin is a mischievous goblin that plays tricks in children’s stories. When used figuratively, hobgoblin refers to something that causes fear or worry.
// This Halloween we were greeted at our door by werewolves, mummies, and a wide assortment of sweet-toothed hobgoblins.
hobgoblin in Context
“Vampires and zombies took a big bite out of the horror box office in Sinners and 28 Years Later, and with Del Toro’s Frankenstein hitting theaters next week, it would seem that a return to classic marquee monsters is one of the stories of this summer’s movie season. But there’s one old-school hobgoblin that’s lurking around the edges of this narrative, omnipresent, repeated across a number of notable new titles, but still somehow avoiding the limelight: the witch ...” — Payton McCarty-Simas, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 Aug. 2025
Did You Know?
While a goblin is traditionally regarded in folklore as a grotesque, evil, and malicious creature, a hobgoblin tends to be more of a playful troublemaker. (The character of Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream might be regarded as one.) First appearing in English in the early 1500s, hobgoblin combined goblin (ultimately from the Greek word for “rogue,” kobalos) with hob, a word from Hobbe (a nickname for Robert) that was used both for clownish louts and rustics and in fairy tales for a mischievous sprite or elf. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson famously applied the word’s extended sense in his essay Self-Reliance: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Test Your Vocabulary
What three-letter word for a breed of small, sturdy, wrinkly dogs, was once also used as a synonym of hobgoblin?
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