Voodoo is a religion, most closely linked with Haiti, and also found in parts of West Africa and in Louisiana in the United States. Believers honour spirits, use songs, drums and dance in ceremonies, and may ask a priest or priestess for help with sickness, love or trouble. It grew out of West African religions carried across the sea by enslaved people, and in Haiti it mixed with Catholic saints and images. That is the real thing. In everyday English, though, the word is often used for the film version: dolls stuck with pins, curses, dead people walking. That picture is mostly invention, and it has been used unkindly against Haitian people for a long time, so it is worth knowing that the popular meaning and the actual religion are not the same. From this comes a second, looser use: people say "voodoo" about anything they think is nonsense dressed up as knowledge — most famously "voodoo economics", meaning money policy that cannot really work. Here it is always an insult. You will also see it as an adjective in "voodoo doll", "voodoo priest", and rarely as a verb meaning to put a curse on someone. Careful writers now often prefer the spelling *Vodou* (capital V) for the religion itself, keeping "voodoo" for the film-and-insult sense.