demon

[dee-muh n] /ˈdi mən/
noun
1.
an evil spirit; devil or fiend.
2.
an evil passion or influence.
3.
a person considered extremely wicked, evil, or cruel.
4.
a person with great energy, drive, etc.:
He's a demon for work.
5.
a person, especially a child, who is very mischievous:
His younger son is a real little demon.
6.
daemon.
7.
Australian Slang. a policeman, especially a detective.
adjective
8.
of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or noting a demon.
9.
possessed or controlled by a demon.
Origin
1350-1400; Middle English < Latin daemonium < Greek daimónion, thing of divine nature (in Jewish and Christian writers, evil spirit), neuter of daimónios, derivative of daímōn; (def 6) < Latin; see daemon

demon-

1.
variant of demono- before a vowel:
demonism.
Examples from the web for demon
  • Perhaps, but to judge by all the frenetic activity going on, the demon unleashed is more likely to be exhaustion.
  • Its going to take a combination of all to overcome this demon.
  • Ryan tells us what happens when players conjure up a demon by accident.
  • At a full stop-for the moment, the swift fox is a real speed demon.
  • Many have given up tobacco-company grants, and all have bowed to current sensitivities about the demon weed.
  • They don't fall off the wagon they're pushed by an inner demon.
  • At noon a village performed a play about a good spirit overcoming a mud-covered demon.
  • And for all those murders, people claimed the killings were the work of a demon.
  • It's only the temptation of demon irony that draws it onto protest signs.
  • In an ocean full of whoppers, marlins are the ultimate swordsmen speed demon predator.
British Dictionary definitions for demon

demon

/ˈdiːmən/
noun
1.
an evil spirit or devil
2.
a person, habit, obsession, etc, thought of as evil, cruel, or persistently tormenting
3.
Also called daemon, daimon. an attendant or ministering spirit; genius: the demon of inspiration
4.
  1. a person who is extremely skilful in, energetic at, or devoted to a given activity, esp a sport: a demon at cycling
  2. (as modifier): a demon cyclist
5.
a variant spelling of daemon (sense 1)
6.
(Austral & NZ, informal, archaic) a detective or policeman
7.
(computing) a part of a computer program, such as a help facility, that can run in the background behind the current task or application, and which will only begin to work when certain conditions are met or when it is specifically invoked
Word Origin
C15: from Latin daemōn evil spirit, spirit, from Greek daimōn spirit, deity, fate; see daemon
Word Origin and History for demon
n.

c.1200, from Latin daemon "spirit," from Greek daimon "deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, tutelary deity" (sometimes including souls of the dead); "one's genius, lot, or fortune;" from PIE *dai-mon- "divider, provider" (of fortunes or destinies), from root *da- "to divide" (see tide).

Used (with daimonion) in Christian Greek translations and Vulgate for "god of the heathen" and "unclean spirit." Jewish authors earlier had employed the Greek word in this sense, using it to render shedim "lords, idols" in the Septuagint, and Matt. viii:31 has daimones, translated as deofol in Old English, feend or deuil in Middle English. Another Old English word for this was hellcniht, literally "hell-knight."

The original mythological sense is sometimes written daemon for purposes of distinction. The Demon of Socrates was a daimonion, a "divine principle or inward oracle." His accusers, and later the Church Fathers, however, represented this otherwise. The Demon Star (1895) is Algol.

demon in Technology

1. (Often used equivalently to daemon, especially in the Unix world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic). A program or part of a program which is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur.
At MIT they use "demon" for part of a program and "daemon" for an operating system process.
Demons (parts of programs) are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was. This is similar to the triggers used in relational databases.
The use of this term may derive from "Maxwell's Demons" - minute beings which can reverse the normal flow of heat from a hot body to a cold body by only allowing fast moving molecules to go from the cold body to the hot one and slow molecules from hot to cold. The solution to this apparent thermodynamic paradox is that the demons would require an external supply of energy to do their work and it is only in the absence of such a supply that heat must necessarily flow from hot to cold.
Walt Bunch believes the term comes from the demons in Oliver Selfridge's paper "Pandemonium", MIT 1958, which was named after the capital of Hell in Milton's "Paradise Lost". Selfridge likened neural cells firing in response to input patterns to the chaos of millions of demons shrieking in Pandemonium.
2. Demon Internet Ltd.
3. A program generator for differential equation problems.
[N.W. Bennett, Australian AEC Research Establishment, AAEC/E142, Aug 1965].
[Jargon File]
(1998-09-04)
demon in the Bible

See DAEMON.