demon

English demon goes back to Greek daimon, a word alive by the time of Homer in the early 1st millennium BCE. In archaic and classical Greek, a daimon was a divine or semi-divine power, often undefined and not necessarily evil. It could be a distributor of fate, a guiding presence, or an unseen power at work. The word began broad, not blackened.

Greek philosophers sharpened the term without making it wicked. Plato used daimonion for a divine inner sign, and later writers used daimon for beings between gods and humans. When the word passed into Latin as daemon, the older spiritual sense still held. The moral fall came later through religious conflict and translation.

Jewish and Christian Greek gave the term a darker edge by using daimonion for hostile spirits in scriptural and theological writing. Latin Christianity adopted daemon in that hostile sense, and medieval Europe inherited the fear with the word. Old French and Anglo-French forms helped carry it into English. By the Middle English period, demon had become an enemy spirit rather than an ambiguous power.

Modern English keeps that later judgment. A demon is now an evil spirit, or by extension a tormenting force, a destructive impulse, or an unusually driven person. Yet the older Greek shadow still shows through in phrases about inner forces and unseen drives. The word remembers a spirit before it became a monster.