Nosferatu (word)

Nosferatu has been presented as an archaic Romanian word synonymous with "vampire". It was largely popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Western fiction such as the gothic novel Dracula (1897) and the German expressionist film Nosferatu (1922). One of the suggested etymologies of the term is that it is derived from the Romanian nesuferitul ('the offensive one' or 'the insufferable one').

One proposed etymology of nosferatu is that the term derives from the Greek nosophoros (Greek: νοσοφόρος), meaning "disease-bearing". The word appears to be quite rare in Greek. The variant νοσηφόρος ("nosēphoros"), is attested in fragments from a 2nd-century AD work by Marcellus Sidetes on medicine. Another variant appears in the Ionic dialect as νουσοφόρος ("nousophoros") in the Palatine Anthology.

Other etymologies connect the term to various Romanian terms. These include necurat ("unclean"), which is commonly associated with the occult, nesuferit ("unbearable, insufferable), and nefârtat ("enemy", lit. "unbrothered"). The nominative masculine definite form of a Romanian noun in the declension to which these words belong takes the ending "-ul" or even the shortened "u", as in Romanian "l" is usually omitted in pronunciation, so the definite forms nefârtatu, necuratu and nesuferitu are commonly encountered.