Bram Stoker's Dracula, translation of a line [in Romanian]

[Mississippienne]

@Dan_ch

He says two words: “Strigoi” and “Moloi”. “Strigoi” means ghost. I guess that “moloi” is a mispronunciation of “moroi”, which is also a kind of ghostlike creature. A synonym for “moroi” is “vârcolac” - the romanian cousin of the more famous werewolf.

Nitpick: Dracula does not mean Dragon. The closer word for “dragon” in romanian would be “balaur”. “Drac” = devil. “Dracul” is the articulate form, meaning “the devil” (not necesarilly Lucifer himself, usually it refers to one of his horned minions).
But you’re right that Dracula got his nickname due to a dragon. His father (Vlad Dracul) was member of the order of the Dragon. It seems that the emblem of the order looked more like a devil than a dragon (at least his subjects thought so). In romanian language, “a” can be used to indicate possession of something (in a similar way to french - “c’est a moi” would be “este a mea” in romanian). It can be also used to indicate father-son links, like scandivanians do with “son” (Magnusson - son of Magnus), only that in romanian the “a” is put in front of the name. I don’t know why in Dracula’s case the “a” is at the end.

Not in modern day Romanian, perhaps, but Vlad Dracula lived centuries ago. In Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, they have this to say about his famous name from pg. 8-9 (my comments are in brackets):

Both father and son [Dracul and Dracula] had the given name Vlad. The names Dracul and Dracula and variations thereof in different languages (such as Dracole, Draculya, Dracol, Draculea, Draculios, Draculia, Tracol) are really nicknames. What’s more, both nicknames had two meaning. Dracul meant “devil”, as it still does in Romanian today; in addition it meant “dragon”… [Vlad Dracula] was also called Dracula, a diminutive meaning “son of the dragon” or “son of the devil”.

Florescu is Romanian, and presumably knows the language well. It would seem that at that time dracul had not yet come to mean only devil; as his father was a member of the Order of the Dragon, Vlad Dracula’s nickname doubtlessly derived from that, not for any “devilish” traits he may or may not have possessed. McNally and Florescu include pictures of Vlad Dracul’s coins, which had a dragon on one side and the eagle of Wallachia (medieval Romania) on the other. Vlad Dracula, his son, was known as Dracula during his lifetime and signed his name as DRAKULYA in a missive from the Sibiu archive.