It’s a word used to mean “unclean” in a taboo way. Instead the meaning is much more in the sense of unbearable, offensive, horrible, diseased. The prefix “ne” indicates the negative, the root “suferi” means “suffer.” However in practice nesuferit doesn’t mean “insufferable” as in “oh, that annoying man is insufferable”. The Romanian word “nesuferit” literally means “insufferable”.
Instead, it’s way more likely that “nosferatu” is a Germanicization of a Romanian word before Romanian spelling was standardized, which it wasn’t even in the late nineteenth century. However, other German writers like Heinrich von Wlislocki treat “nosferatu” or “der Nosferat” as a Romanian word, so researchers who have gone down rabbit holes trying to derive it from the Greek for “diseased” or the Latin for “not breathing” or some Slavic basis are, quite frankly, barking up the wrong tree. Thing is, there is no such word as “nosferatu” in Romanian. Romanian is not a Slavic language, but a Romance language, as you might guess from the name. The word “vampire”, by the way, came to English from French, to French from German, and to German via Hungarian from the Slavic languages.
In this she is backed up by German writer Wilhelm Schmidt, who also treated it as the Romanian word for vampire. Stoker got the word from Emily Gerard, who mentions it in her works on Transylvanian superstitions which Stoker used for research, where she makes it out to be the Romanian word for vampire. So, we’ve gotten to the part in Dracula Daily where Bram Stoker starts throwing around the word nosferatu.
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