Word of the Day

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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.”