Cthulhu
fictional cosmic entity
Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft. The character was introduced in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu", published by the American pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. Considered a Great Old One within the pantheon of Lovecraftian cosmic entities, he is depicted as a gigantic entity worshipped by cultists, in a green humanoid form incorporating visual elements similar to an octopus and dragon. As the namesake of the Lovecraft-inspired Cthulhu Mythos, Cthulhu has since been featured in numerous pop culture references.
Etymology, spelling, and pronunciation
Invented by Lovecraft in 1926, the name Cthulhu was probably chosen to echo the word chthonic (Ancient Greek "of the earth"), as apparently suggested by Lovecraft himself at the end of his 1923 tale "The Rats in the Walls". The chthonic, or earth-dwelling, spirit has precedents in numerous ancient and medieval mythologies, often guarding mines and precious underground treasures, notably in the Germanic dwarfs and the Greek Chalybes, Telchines, or Dactyls.
Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as Khlûl′-hloo, and said, "the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The 'u' is about like that in 'full', and the first syllable is not unlike 'klul' in sound, hence the 'h' represents the guttural thickness" yielding something akin to /ˈq(χ)lʊlˌɬuː/. S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave different pronunciations on different occasions. According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12038. VIAF identifies the subject as 280755291. The Library of Congress control number is no2017024148. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1926 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cthulhu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.