12 November 2015

barghest or barguest

[bahr-gest]

Noun
1. a legendary doglike goblin believed to portend death or misfortune.

Origin of barghest

Old English

1725-1735; apparently bar(row)2+ ghest, Old English gæst, variant of gāst ghost

Dictionary.com Unabridged

Examples from the Web for barghest Expand

Historical Examples

The barghest has a kinsman in the Rongeur d’Os of Norman folklore.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3
Various

The barghest was essentially a nocturnal spectre, and its appearance was regarded as a portent of death.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition.

Today’s quote

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

– Mitchell Kapor

On this day

12 November 1927 – Josef Stalin takes full control of the Soviet Union after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party a few weeks earlier.

12 November 1944 – sinking of the German battleship, Tirpitz. The Allies had tried for two years to sink the ship. Finally, 32 British Lancaster bombers attack and sink the ship.

12 November 1990 – Swiss computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, publishes a formal proposal for hyper-text transfer, this followed his proposal for Information Management, published in March 1989. On 25 December 1990, he makes the world’s first successful communication between a hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP) client and a server; and the world wide web is born. He is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which oversees the ongoing development of the world-wide web.