lic

The Old English word lic (also lych or lich) meant 'body' or 'corpse.' It was not supernatural. A lichgate (or lychgate) is the roofed gate at the entrance to a churchyard where coffin bearers rested the body before burial. A lichfield is a field of bodies — a burial ground. The word was as ordinary as 'body' itself. Germanic cognates include German Leiche ('corpse') and Dutch lijk ('body').

The supernatural lich — an undead sorcerer who has preserved itself through dark magic — was invented in the 20th century. Clark Ashton Smith's short stories in the 1930s and 1940s used the word for animated corpses. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories developed the concept further. But the modern lich — a skeletal wizard who stores its soul in a phylactery to achieve immortality — was codified by Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s.

Gary Gygax and the D&D team took an archaic English word for 'body' and gave it a specific supernatural meaning: an undead being that chose undeath through magic, retaining its intelligence and power. The lich was distinguished from zombies (mindless) and vampires (cursed). The lich wanted this. It performed the ritual deliberately. The horror was the ambition, not the decay.

The word has now re-entered English almost exclusively through gaming and fantasy. Most English speakers under forty who know the word 'lich' learned it from a video game or a tabletop RPG, not from standing under a lichgate in an English churchyard. A thousand years of meaning — body, corpse, burial — have been overwritten by a single game designer's decision in 1975.