Here's a bit of commentary on the words ghost and spirit. As noted in foregoing postings, Holy Ghost was the translation used for the Latin Spiritus Sanctus and Greek Hagia Pneuma. Do you notice something about the words spiritus and pneuma? They have to do with breath . Indeed, there is a connection in both Latin and Greek between spirit in the sense of disembodied being and the breath. Curiously enough, this goes right back to the opening of the book of Genesis, written in Hebrew, a language unrelated to Latin and Greek, which speaks of the ruach Elohim, translated as the "spirit of God" [moved upon the face of the waters]; ruach means either breath or spirit.