Mephistopheles

Meanings

Proper Noun

• The Devil to whom Faust sold his soul in the legend.

Noun

• A fiendish person, especially one who tricks someone into following a destructive or disastrous course of action; a tempter.

Origin

• The name Mephistopheles is a corrupted Greek compound. The Greek particle of negation (μη, mē) and the Greek word for love or loving (φίλος, philos) are the first and last terms of the compound but the middle term is more doubtful. For the middle term, three meanings have been noticed and three different complete etymologies have been established: 1) not loving light, 2) not loving Faust, (φως το, phosto; the old form of the word being Mephostopheles), 3) allied to mephitic, a term which designates the poisonous vapors arising from the earth in certain places pools caverns springs destructive of human life.