Definition of "dybbuk" []

• In Jewish folklore, the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls his or her behavior. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The wife replies that her husband is mistaken, the relative has been dead for three years, and what her husband saw was a dybbuk a Yiddish word used in this context to mean “evil spirit”."
• "The surname, Dibbuk, refers to the Yiddish word dybbuk that the Encyclopedia Britannica defines as "a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person.""
• "A dybbuk is the spirit of a dead man that enters the body of another living being and possesses it."