/ˈbænʃiː/
[noun] A spirit from Irish and Scottish folklore, believed to appear near a family's home and cry out loudly as a warning that someone in the family is about to die.
The banshee is literally a 'woman of the fairy mound' — a supernatural messenger tied to the ancient Irish belief that the dead lived inside hills.
The word banshee enters English in the late 17th century, borrowed directly from the Irish Gaelic phrase 'bean sídhe', which breaks down into two beautifully ancient pieces: 'bean', meaning woman, and 'sídhe', meaning fairy mound or the supernatural realm inside the earth. The sídhe were the hollow hills of Ireland, believed by the pre-Christian Celts to be the dwelling places of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods who had retreated beneath the ground after being defeated by mortal invaders. A banshee, then, was quite literally a woman who belonged to that underground otherworld.
The root of 'bean' (woman) traces back to Proto-Celtic 'benā', which is connected to the Proto-Indo-European root 'gʷen-', meaning woman. This same ancient root rippled outward across many languages over thousands of years: Proto-Celtic 'benā' → Old Irish 'ben' → Irish Gaelic 'bean'. The same Indo-European root also gave Greek 'gynē' → English 'gynaecology', and Old English 'cwene' → Modern English 'queen'. It is a remarkably deep root for such a small word.
The second element, 'sídhe', has an equally rich history. In Old Irish it was spelled 'síd' and referred specifically to the fairy mounds — the grass-covered prehistoric burial mounds, such as Newgrange, that dotted the Irish landscape. These real, physical places became mythologised as portals to the world of the dead and the supernatural. The word 'sídhe' eventually came to refer not just to the mounds themselves but to the fairy folk who were said to inhabit them. When Irish speakers said 'bean sídhe', they were pointing to a very specific and terrifying class of supernatural being: a woman of that hidden kingdom beneath the earth.
The banshee's role in Irish tradition was not simply to cause death — she was a herald, a messenger. Each of the great old Irish families was said to have its own banshee, a spirit attached by blood and loyalty to a specific clan. When a member of that family was about to die, the banshee would appear outside the home and wail — a cry described as somewhere between a mournful song and a scream that could shatter the night. Only those of noble Gaelic descent were said to merit such a warning, a detail that reveals how deeply the tradition was tied to ideas of ancestry and lineage.
The word passed into English through close contact between English settlers and the native Irish population during the 17th century, appearing in written English texts around the 1680s. As it travelled, its spelling was anglicised from 'bean sídhe' into the single compressed form 'banshee', losing its grammatical Irish structure but keeping its eerie power. Over time, the banshee migrated out of specifically Irish belief into broader popular culture, becoming a general symbol of a terrifying wailing spirit in literature, film, and music. Today the word is used informally to describe any person or thing that makes a loud, piercing scream — as in the phrase 'screaming like a banshee' — a usage that has entirely shed the supernatural origins but retains the raw emotional force of that ancient Irish cry.