CLEVELAND — Ghosts! Ghouls! Witches! Werewolves!

It's the time of year when such spooky terms abound, but have you ever wondered where this season's most haunting words come from? Let's learn about the entomology... whoops, wrong word. Let's learn about the etymology of Halloween .

The word Halloween seems like a good place to start. The Christian holiday All Saints' Day has been celebrated on Nov. 1 for over a thousand years. Another word for "saint" is "hallow" — as in "hallowed ground" — and the evening before a feast day was called an "even."

Over time, "All Hallows' Even" was shortened for convenience to "Hallows' Even." By the 1700s, the Scots had shortened "even" to "e'en," giving us "Hallowe'en." We also ditched the unsightly apostrophe.

The word pumpkin traces back to the

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