eerie
Americanadjective
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uncanny, so as to inspire superstitious fear; weird
an eerie midnight howl.
-
Chiefly Scot. affected with superstitious fear.
adjective
Synonym Usage
See weird.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of eerie
First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English eri, dialectal variant of argh, Old English earg “cowardly”; cognate with Old Frisian erg, Old Norse argr “evil,” German arg “cowardly”
Explanation
Eerie means spooky, creepy or suggestively supernatural. If it's eerie, it's sure to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Back in the 1300s when eerie first came on the scene, it meant "fearful or timid." It took a good 500 years or so before it morphed into the adjective we know today, which now means "causing fear because of strangeness." And the strangeness is key: Something that's eerie isn't just scary. It's mysterious, ghostly, and gives you the creeps. Like dark old castles, misty graveyards and creaky sounds in the middle of the night.
Vocabulary lists containing eerie
The Grim Reader: Wicked Words of Grave Importance for Halloween
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Uncanny, Creepy, or Downright Scary: Words For Halloween
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NAEP Test Words
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
That is until Thatcher ratchets up the eerie tension tenfold while Refn builds his gorgeous fantasy around her.
From Salon ● Aug. 17, 2026
Plymouth Astronomical Society chairman Chris Cooke said the darkness brought by the eclipse would be "eerie".
From BBC ● Aug. 8, 2026
Suddenly, the world is plunged into an eerie, violet darkness.
From Barron's ● Aug. 5, 2026
The eerie ambient music that drives “Obsession” — so artfully serrated and delicately mangled by Burwell — emerged from a counterintuitive creative nuance that AI could never capture.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 21, 2026
White mist hung in the air like frozen spiderwebs, and the roaring flames of the Burning Sea faded as a blanket of eerie silence covered us.
From "Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky" by Kwame Mbalia
Schlossberg, we should mention here, is Kennedy’s cousin once removed, which adds an even eerier aura to the story.
From Slate ● Aug. 7, 2024
An eerier kind of togetherness emerged in John Jasperse’s “Visitation,” for Doug LeCours, Tim Bendernagel and Cynthia Koppe.
From New York Times ● Dec. 2, 2022
Even eerier was the lead story, about Adolf Hitler and the rise of his Third Reich.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 26, 2021
The result is even eerier than the Alexa connected to a singing Big Mouth Billy Bass robot that made some waveslast year.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 26, 2017
Eerie it was in the dim light, eerier it was now in the dark, with those hoarse mutterings from beneath, and those thunderous reverberations pealing at irregular intervals through the unknown spaces above.
From In Search of the Okapi A Story of Adventure in Central Africa by Ernest Glanville
With worries about the spread of gun ownership in his head, Fogerty devised one of his eeriest productions for this swampy psych-rock number.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 3, 2025
Otherwise, the town’s eeriest feature is its isolation.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 27, 2022
Plenty has been written about no crowds in sporting stadiums, but a Wales and England encounter in the Six Nations presented perhaps the eeriest atmosphere yet.
From BBC ● Feb. 27, 2021
Every winter I reread — sometimes for myself, sometimes with my children — Susan Cooper’s “The Dark Is Rising,” surely one of the eeriest novels there is.
From New York Times ● Nov. 19, 2020
The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.
From "The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
