daemon
Americannoun
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Classical Mythology.
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a god.
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a subordinate deity, as the genius of a place or a person's attendant spirit.
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a demon.
noun
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a demigod
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the guardian spirit of a place or person
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a variant spelling of demon
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of daemon
< Latin daemōn a spirit, an evil spirit < Greek daímōn a deity, fate, fortune; compare daíesthai to distribute
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
“I’d love to have a daemon that can blow dry my hair for me,” she said.
From Salon ● Jul. 18, 2026
Whether sinful passions or unconscious destructive urges, distracting attachments or visceral impulses, desire is the daemon that makes us act, often against our own interests and those of others.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 8, 2026
The BBC, by contrast, is seeing the epic drama through from the opening glass of tokay to the concluding moment, when Lyra's daemon mutates into a pine marten.
From BBC ● Nov. 9, 2020
And in this 16-year-old story, he prefigured the painful estrangement between his heroine and her daemon that he had no inkling would feature in a future novel about Lyra’s adulthood.
From Slate ● Oct. 14, 2020
The man’s daemon, a big heavy wolverine, snarled back, but Pantalaimon didn’t flinch.
From "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
