Today, eating dinner with my girlfriend, I used the word "aghast" in conversation. I quickly saw she didn't know it (her first language is Japanese), so rephrased the sentence with an easier word. But then I explained the word "aghast" to her. And then, we talked about the general pattern.
In English, certain words are formed by taking a verb and adding "a" at the front to get a poetic sounding adjective. Some examples:
blaze --> ablaze
float --> afloat
sleep --> asleep
drift --> adrift
wake --> awake
live --> alive
And so on. I theorized that aghast was originally one of these adjectives, and that there must have originally been a word "ghast". This is an example where a word drops out of the language, but its derivative stays. Take for example the phrase "Merry Christmas". The word "Merry" is all but gone from the English language, and yet "Merry Christmas" will stay, probably for a long time.
It turned out I was basically correct about my theory (we looked it up in her dictionary later).
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