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vampire

The Slavic undead upyr' is named already in 1047, but the West learned of it from Austrian officials reporting on corpse-hunts in Serbian villages in the 1720s; their German reports spread vampir to French and English, and novels and films carried it back east to Russian and on to Japanese.

Weakest linkProbable

The road to English

From Proto-Slavic to Old East Slavic

From Proto-Slavic to Polish

From German to Hungarian

From German to French, Russian

From French to Spanish

From French to Italian

From English to Japanese

600 CEProto-Slavic

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.

vampire

Weakest linkProbable

The road to English

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