Meaning

7 senses
  1. (informal)A ghost or phantom.

    The building was haunted by a couple of spooks.

    Geist, Phantom, Gespenst

    при́зракprízrak

  2. (informal)A scare or fright.

    The big spider gave me a spook.

  3. (slang)An undercover agent, spy, or intelligence analyst.

    Geheimagent, Spion

    шпио́нšpión

  4. (dated, ethnic, offensive, slang, slur)A black person.

    ни́ггерnígger

  5. A metaphysical manifestation; an artificial distinction or construct.

  6. (US, slang)A psychiatrist.

  7. (slang)A player who engages in hole carding by attempting to glimpse the dealer's hole card when the dealer checks under an ace or a 10 to see if a blackjack is present.

More definitions
  • a mental representation of some haunting experience
  • someone unpleasantly strange or eccentric

Examples

61 sentences
  1. I didn't mean to spook you.

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  2. Tom's horse got spooked and bolted before he could mount it.

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  3. Something must've spooked Tom.

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  4. Tom looked spooked.

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  5. Horses are easily spooked.

    ruЛошадей легко вспугнуть.

    dePferde scheuen leicht.

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Translations

4 languages
Русский
By meaning 3
ghost or phantom:
spy:
pejorative: black person:
Deutsch
By meaning 2
ghost or phantom:
spy:

Origin

Borrowed from Dutch spook (“ghost”), from Middle Dutch spooc (“spook, ghost”). Cognate wit

Borrowed from Dutch spook (“ghost”), from Middle Dutch spooc (“spook, ghost”). Cognate with Middle Low German spôk, spûk (“apparition, ghost”), Middle High German gespük (“a haunting”), German Spuk, Danish spøge (“to haunt”), Swedish spöke (“ghost”).

Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Forms

plural: spooks
Singularspook
Pluralspooks

regular

Synonyms

9 synonyms
Close in meaning

See also

neighbours in the dictionary
spook — meaning, examples, forms, synonyms | Krumeto