Variation of gast, from Middle English gasten, from Old English gāstan (“to meditate”) and gǣstan (“to gast, frighten, afflict, torment”). More at gast. Spelling influenced by ghost.
Poetic abbreviation of ghastly. Use as a noun influenced by ghost.
Meanings
An evil spirit or monster; a ghoul.
The cliff-ghast wrenched off the fox's head, and fought his brothers for the entrails. 2000, Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass:
The most powerful of all undead creatures, ghasts feed on ghosts, dead souls and, most especially, live ones. They want to take over Iltior and set up a ghast empire. 2007, Ian Irvine, Runcible Jones & the Buried City:
A malamanteau, or malapropistically used neologism that is also a portmanteau (yeah, isn't that a conceptual mouthful), the ghast was an incidental combination of ghost and ghastly […] As the post-interview continued, Carlos and I laughed as we recognized his malamanteau, what he chucklingly redescribed as a "ghastly ghost" […] "Ghast" is a neologism and portmanteau of ghost and ghastly that was used malapropistically. This, thus, constitutes a malamanteau. 2022, James Joshua Coleman, “The Fabulous Rhetorics of Queer Inhumanity”, in Jacqueline Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander, editors, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric, New York: Routledge, →ISBN: