English acquired the word vampire in March 1732, from a newspaper story about a dead Serbian soldier. Within two months the same press was using it for embezzlers. The metaphor is older than the monster's fame.
Documented
The paper trail is complete
Serbian vampir became German Vampir in the Habsburg reports of 1725, crossed the Channel with the Medvedja story in March 1732 (London Journal, then the Grub-Street Journal), and entered French as vampire. On May 20, 1732, the Craftsman was already calling sharpers, usurers, stockjobbers and fraudulent guardians Vampyres. The deeper root is contested: Slavic upir, attested in an Old Russian manuscript colophon of 1047 that brands a priest Upir Likhyi, Wicked Vampire; or, on a disputed theory, a Turkic ubyr, witch. The OED's earliest English citation is 1734, two years behind the actual newspapers.
Assessment: Documented to the day: the 1732 datelines, the Craftsman passage, the 1047 colophon, the unsettled root. A rare case where a word's arrival can be pinned to a specific press run.
Stories
Everything drinks blood if you look long enough
The universalist claim: Lilith, the lamia, the empousa, the ekimmu, the penanggalan, the aswang, the adze, the jiangshi: blood-drinkers on every continent, therefore vampires are ancient and global. Montague Summers built a career on the argument, and half of modern occult publishing still leans on it.
Assessment: The parallels are real and the inference is not. A shared appetite across mythologies shows that humans fear the same things; the specific creature, a risen corpse turned plague vector, staked under daylight bureaucracy, is a documented eighteenth-century Balkan product. Universal dread, local paperwork.
Interesting claims
The vampire was born a political insult
The word spent its second month of English life attacking the South Sea directors and the Charitable Corporation. Voltaire finished the move in 1764: the true bloodsuckers are in Paris and London, in vestments or on the Exchange. Marx made it structural: capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour. Every age since keeps the accusation and sheds the corpse: vampire squids for banks, energy vampires for colleagues.
Assessment: Documented from the Craftsman of 1732 forward. The word has spent more of its English career describing the living than the dead, which may be the deepest fact the archive holds about vampires.
Sources and further reading
Frombald's report, Wienerisches Diarium (July 1725), Vampyri in print
London Journal and Grub-Street Journal (March 1732), the Arnold Paul story
The Craftsman (May 20, 1732), Vampyres as stockjobbers
Oxford English Dictionary, vampire: earliest citation 1734, and the open etymology dispute
The Novgorod colophon (1047), Upir Likhyi, the oldest attestation