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:
But these sights are drained of their warmth, depicted with a cold, eerie hum that, when it bleeds into the roar of suffering miles away, becomes a deafening cacophony.
From Salon ● Sep. 21, 2026
Part of the eerie sound surrounding data centres is the relative absence of actual permanent workers coming and going.
From BBC ● Sep. 15, 2026
Using their invisible arms, they ushered the girl to shelves lined with art, history and photography books, teaching Rosales how to appreciate the eerie, the tragic, the mysterious, the romantic, the ephemeral and the hard-to-find.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 9, 2026
Behind him, veiled by the haze, the sun appeared as an eerie, rust-coloured ball in the brown-grey sky.
From Barron's ● Sep. 6, 2026
He crouched low, growling an eerie warning, ears flattened tight against his solid head.
From "Hattie Big Sky" by Kirby Larson
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
Filmed by director of photography Bojan Bazelli, “The Ring” adopts an unnatural greenish-turquoise-cyan hue that makes Seattle and the apartment complex appear eerier than its real-life counterpart between First Avenue, Seneca Street and Western Avenue.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 13, 2022
Even eerier was the lead story, about Adolf Hitler and the rise of his Third Reich.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 26, 2021
“Just when you think the Chelsea Hotel couldn’t get any eerier, I worked in the hotel for two years after it closed,” she said.
From New York Times ● Apr. 9, 2016
The house seemed eerier than ever, full of subdued complaints and whisperings.
From Gone to Earth by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb
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
It was the eeriest week yet in the yearslong saga that is the unraveling of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
From Slate ● May 13, 2023
He’s our reigning master of the macabre, whose ghostly imagination still transports us to the eeriest of places.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 26, 2023
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
It was one of the eeriest and uncomfortablest feelings I ever had, watching a boy lead cheers for me.
From "Crash" by Jerry Spinelli
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.
