12 Rare Old Words for Monsters

Monsters are everywhere. Vampires (like the one in the recently released Nosferatu) and zombies are the most popular of the undead community, and they share cultural space with werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, animated mummies, and other supernatural beasties. Then there are mythological creatures such as the minotaur and Pegasus, and cryptids like the Yeti and the Mothman. Many monsters haven’t quite made it to feature-film status, so please enjoy the following obscure terms for creatures across the monster spectrum.

(Side note: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has several amusing variations of monster. These include monstership—as in, “Your monstership”; bemonster, meaning “to treat someone like a monster”; monsterfy, “to make a monster of”; monster-master, which refers to someone who masters monsters or “a master who is a monster”; and monstricide, meaning “the murder of a monster.” Language is the greatest monster of all.)

1. Pickehorn, Bycorne, and Chicheface
2. Lau
3. Lamia
4. Polyphemus
5. Scylla and Charybdis
6. Snallygaster
7. Mormo
8. Orc and Orken

Pickehorn, Bycorne, and Chicheface

Pickehorn, a rare term for a monster of some sort, appeared in the mid-1500s. It may be an alteration of Bycorne, which the OED defines as “a fabulous beast represented in an old satire as feeding on patient husbands, and being always fat from the abundance of the diet, whilst his spouse chicheface or Chichevache … fed upon patient wives and was always lean.” Less mature minds may prefer to think pickehorn refers to a creature with a pickle for a horn.

Lau

According to the OED, a lau is “An African water monster supposed to live in the swamps of the Nile valley.” Lau has been found in print since the 1920s and is mentioned alongside a similarly named creature in a 1937 issue of Discovery magazine: “The lau and the lukwata, monstrous beasts whose hideous calls are heard booming through the grey night-mists of the lakes.”

Lamia

Lamia, which has appeared print since the late 1300s, refers to “A mythical creature depicted as a woman who preys on humans, especially children, by sucking their blood,” per the OED (which also notes that it can also refer to a witch or a demon). A 1674 use from Charles Cotton’s The Compleat Gamester shows the term in use: “For here you shall be quickly destroy’d under pretence of kindness, as Men were by the Lamiæ of old.”

Polyphemus

Another word for a cyclops, Polyphemus, has been recorded since the mid-1600s; the word came from Homer’s Odyssey, which featured a one-eyed creature with that name. From there, the word came to be used for any creature with one eye (or what looks like a single eye), including  the Polyphemus moth, which has one eye-spot on each wing. In addition to referring to monsters and moths, Polyphemus can also be used refer to a sort of singlemindedness that is reminiscent of a cyclops. That sense is called upon in an 1845 use in R. W. Hamilton’s Institutions of Popular Education: “When the eyes of the many open, their Polyphemus will cease to be famous for his cyclopean vision.”

Scylla and Charybdis

We have Greek mythology to thank for Scylla and Charybdis, two sea monsters that also pop up in Homer’s Odyssey. Scylla is described by Britannica as “a supernatural female creature, with 12 feet and six heads on long snaky necks, each head having a triple row of sharklike teeth, while her loins were girdled by the heads of baying dogs,” while Charybdis “drank down and belched forth the waters thrice a day and was fatal to shipping.”

In addition to their monster meanings, the terms also refer to a rock on the Italian coast of the Straits of Messina and a whirlpool opposite the rock. The earliest citations date from the the 1520s and the 1400s, respectively, and they were used figuratively by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice: “When I shun Scilla your father, I fall into Caribdis your mother.” That’s a more poetic (and wet) version of being caught between a rock and a hard place.

Snallygaster

This critter comes from the cryptid side of things. The earliest known use is from the Maryland periodical in 1940, which reported that residents of a Black neighborhood “are firm in their belief that the neighborhood has a ‘snallygaster’—a fabulous reptilian bird of vast size” that hunted their birds and children alike. The word is derived from the German schnelle geister, meaning “quick spirits.” Snallygaster is similar to snollygoster, an mid-19th-century term that referred a sketchy individual, such as the typical politician. According to an 1895 use from the Columbus Dispatch, “A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy’.” Unfortunately, snollygosters abound.

Mormo

This term for an imaginary monster, usually created for the purpose of scaring kids, dates back to the 17th century. It’s derived from a Greek word for a “hideous female monster,” in the words of the OED.

Orc and Orken

In the 1500s, this monstrous word originally referred to generic sea monsters and then, soon after, a killer whale. By the following century, orc had evolved to refer to “A devouring monster; an ogre; {specifically} a member of an imaginary race of subhuman creatures, small and human-like in form but having ogreish features and warlike, malevolent characters,” according to the OED. If that sounds familiar, you might be a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, who used orc as the name of the hideous foot soldiers in his Lord of the Rings books and popularized it far beyond the other monster words on this list. Orc is derived from the Italian orco, which refers to a giant who eats people. Yum.

A similar word, the mid-19th-century orken, is unrelated to orc, but it does share that term’s early definition of “sea monster.”

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