The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the English wordvampire (as vampyre) in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published inThe Harleian Miscellany in 1745.[7]Vampires had already been discussed in French[8] and German literature.[9] AfterAustria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires".[9] These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity.[9] The English term was derived (possibly via French vampyre) from the GermanVampir, in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian vampir (Cyrillic: вампир),[1][2][3][10][11][12] when Arnold Paole, a purported vampire in Serbia was described during the time when Northern Serbia was part of the Austrian Empire.
The Serbian form has parallels in virtually all Slavic languages: Bulgarianand Macedonian вампир (vampir),Bosnian: lampir, Croatian vampir, Czechand Slovak upír, Polish wąpierz, and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór,Ukrainian упир (upyr), Russian упырь (upyr'), Belarusian упыр (upyr), from Old East Slavic упирь (upir') (note that many of these languages have also borrowed forms such as "vampir/wampir" subsequently from the West; these are distinct from the original local words for the creature). The exact etymology is unclear.[13] Among the proposed proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyrь and *ǫpirь.[14]
Another, less widespread theory, is that the Slavic languages have borrowed the word from a Turkic term for "witch" (e.g.,Tatar ubyr).[14][15] Czech linguist Václav Machek proposes Slovak verb "vrepiť sa" (stick to, thrust into), or its hypothetical anagram "vperiť sa" (in Czech, archaic verb "vpeřit" means "to thrust violently") as an etymological background, and thus translates "upír" as "someone who thrusts, bites".[16] An early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagantreatise "Word of Saint Grigoriy" (Russian Слово святого Григория), dated variously to the 11th-13th centuries, where pagan worship of upyriis reported.[17][18]
