Halloween Vocabulary in English

Halloween Vocabulary in English: 60 Words, Phrases and 10 Lines

Below are the 60 Halloween words you will actually hear, grouped so you can learn them in ten minutes, followed by the phrases people say at the door, ten idioms that work all year, 10 lines for students and a 1-minute speech. Halloween 2026 falls on Saturday, 31 October. Whether you are joining an office party in Dubai, a school fancy-dress day in Bengaluru, trick-or-treating in Toronto or a themed English class in Manila, these are the words that will come up.

Halloween in one minute

• Date: 31 October every year. In 2026 it is a Saturday, so most parties fall on the night itself.
• The name: short for All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Hallows' Day, which is All Saints' Day on 1 November. All Souls' Day follows on 2 November.
• Where it comes from: the Celtic festival of Samhain (say SAH-win), which marked the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year in Ireland and Scotland.
• What people do: dress up in costumes, carve pumpkins, decorate the house, hand out sweets to children who knock on the door, watch scary films and go to parties.
• Not the same thing: Mexico's Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) on 1 and 2 November, and Undas in the Philippines on the same two days, are family days for remembering the dead. They sit next to Halloween on the calendar but are different festivals.

60 Halloween words in English

Each word comes with a plain meaning and a sentence you could say. Read the sentence column out loud once; that is what makes the word stick.

Things you will see

Creatures and characters

Things people do

Describing words

Sounds and feelings

Phrases you will hear on the night

"Trick or treat!" is what children say when a door opens. The meaning is a playful threat: give us a treat, or we will play a trick on you. In practice everybody gives a treat and nobody plays a trick. The person at the door usually answers "Happy Halloween!" and holds out a bowl of sweets. These are the other lines worth knowing:

• "What are you going as?" The normal way to ask about someone's costume. Answer: "I'm going as a vampire" or "I haven't decided yet."
• "Are you doing anything for Halloween?" The safe small-talk question for colleagues and classmates, because "nothing, really" is a perfectly good answer.
• "We're handing out sweets at home." What a lot of adults actually do.
• "You scared the life out of me!" Said with a laugh after someone jumps out at you.
• "That costume is brilliant. Did you make it yourself?" The compliment everyone is hoping for.
• "I'm not really into scary films." A polite way out of the horror-film plan.
• "Boo!" Only when you are the one doing the scaring.

If you work with a team in the US, the UK, Canada or Australia, Halloween week is one of the easiest small-talk openings of the year. Our guide to small talk at work has the general rules; this page gives you the vocabulary for this particular week.

A short conversation to practise

Two colleagues on a video call, Thursday 29 October.

Priya: Before we start, are you doing anything for Halloween this weekend?

Tom: We're taking the kids trick-or-treating on Saturday. My daughter is going as a witch, complete with a broomstick.

Priya: That sounds fun. We don't really do it in my town, but my son's school has a fancy-dress day on Friday. He wants to be a zombie.

Tom: Classic. Have you carved a pumpkin?

Priya: Not yet. Honestly, I find the whole thing a bit spooky.

Tom: That's the point! Right, shall we look at the numbers?

Read both parts out loud, then swap. Notice that the whole exchange is five short questions and answers; nobody gives a speech.

Ten Halloween idioms you can use all year

These come from the same ghosts and skeletons, but English speakers use them in offices and news reports every week of the year.

• a skeleton in the cupboard (US: in the closet): an embarrassing secret from the past. Every family has a skeleton in the cupboard.
• a ghost town: a place that is empty of people. The office is a ghost town on Friday afternoons.
• a witch hunt: an unfair search for people to blame. The inquiry turned into a witch hunt.
• the graveyard shift: working through the night. Nurses on the graveyard shift finish at seven.
• scared stiff: so frightened that you cannot move. I was scared stiff before the interview.
• to give someone the creeps: to make someone feel uneasy. That empty car park gives me the creeps.
• not a ghost of a chance: no chance at all. We haven't a ghost of a chance of finishing by Monday.
• to dig your own grave: to do something that will cause your own failure. By lying to the client he dug his own grave.
• a skeleton staff: the smallest number of people needed to keep a place running. The branch runs on a skeleton staff over the holidays.
• drop-dead gorgeous: extremely attractive. The venue was drop-dead gorgeous.

Two of the verbs in the tables, dress up and hand out, are phrasal verbs, the kind that trip up most learners. Our list of 50 phrasal verbs for everyday English covers the rest of the common ones.

Six pronunciation traps

• Halloween: three syllables with the stress on the last one, hal-oh-WEEN. Not HAL-oween.
• ghost: say the g, skip the h, and make the o long, like most.
• witch and which sound identical for almost every native speaker. Context does the work.
• pumpkin: PUMP-kin, with the p before the k. Many learners say "pumkin".
• costume: KOS-tyoom in British English, KOS-toom in American. Both are fine; "cos-TUME" is not.
• cauldron: KAWL-drun. The au sounds like law.

10 lines on Halloween for students

1. Halloween is celebrated on 31 October every year.
2. The name comes from All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Saints' Day.
3. It began as Samhain, an old Celtic festival that marked the end of the harvest.
4. People dress up as ghosts, witches, vampires and other characters.
5. Families carve faces into pumpkins and put a light inside to make jack-o'-lanterns.
6. Children go from door to door and say "Trick or treat!" to collect sweets.
7. Houses are decorated with cobwebs, bats and glowing lanterns.
8. Many people watch scary films or tell ghost stories with friends.
9. It is most popular in the United States, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and it is growing in many other countries.
10. Halloween is a fun night to be a little scared and to share treats with friends.

A 1-minute Halloween speech (about 140 words)

For a school assembly, an English club or a class presentation. Say it at about 120 words a minute, slower than you talk to friends.

Good morning, everyone.

This Saturday is the thirty-first of October, Halloween. Long ago, people in Ireland and Scotland believed that on this night the spirits of the dead came back to visit. They lit fires and wore disguises to keep safe. Today the fires are candles inside pumpkins, and the disguises are costumes: witches, vampires, superheroes and, in my cousin's case, a very confused banana.

Children knock on doors and call out "Trick or treat!", and neighbours they have never spoken to all year open up with a bowl of sweets. That, I think, is the best part. For one night, a street full of strangers becomes a street full of neighbours.

So this weekend, whether you dress up or not, say hello to someone you usually walk past. Happy Halloween, and thank you.

Where the words come from

The festival's roots are in Samhain, which the Celts of Ireland and Britain marked at the end of October as the boundary between the light and dark halves of the year. When the Church fixed All Saints' Day on 1 November, the evening before it became All Hallows' Eve, later shortened to Halloween. In Scotland and Ireland, children went guising: they dressed up and performed a song, a poem or a joke at each door in return for fruit, nuts or coins. Irish and Scottish families took the custom to North America in the nineteenth century, where it became trick-or-treating. The jack-o'-lantern comes from an Irish legend about Stingy Jack, who tricked the devil and was left to wander the earth with an ember inside a hollowed turnip; in America the turnip became the much easier-to-carve pumpkin. If a teacher asks for sources, Britannica's entries on Halloween and the history of trick-or-treating cover all of this.

Halloween where our readers live

In the United States, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, Halloween is a full evening: decorated houses, trick-or-treating and parties. In the UAE, Singapore and Malaysia it lives mostly in malls, hotels and international schools. In the Philippines, costume parties happen in the last week of October, and then 1 and 2 November, Undas, are quiet family days at the cemetery. In Vietnam and Indonesia it is a young, city-centred party night. In India it has arrived through schools, offices and malls in the big cities, with fancy-dress days and themed events rather than door-to-door visits, and it lands this year a week before Diwali on Sunday, 8 November, so students who need both can find the essay on Diwali here too. Wherever you are, the English on this page is the same.

Five speaking prompts

Set a timer for one minute each and speak without stopping. Record yourself and listen back for the words you avoided.

1. Describe the costume you would wear if you could make anything, using at least five words from the tables.
2. Explain Halloween to a friend who has never heard of it, in six sentences.
3. Tell a short ghost story that happened "to a friend of a friend". Use eerie, shiver and creep.
4. Compare Halloween with a festival from your own country: what is similar, what is different?
5. Role-play the door: one person knocks and says "Trick or treat!", the other asks about the costume and offers a treat.

Stuck for things to say after the prompts run out? Our list of 60 topics to talk about with friends has a whole section on festivals and films.

Frequently Asked Questions