eerie
Americanadjective
-
uncanny, so as to inspire superstitious fear; weird
an eerie midnight howl.
-
Chiefly Scot. affected with superstitious fear.
adjective
Related Words
See weird.
Other Word Forms
- eerily adverb
- eeriness noun
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”
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.
In “Weapons,” its eerie harmonic movement portends an innocence soon to be lost.
From Los Angeles Times
Some theaters closed and were sold for development, but many are just sitting empty, eerie ghost-town sites among more active businesses.
From Salon
This downturn has impacted his grades, competitive swimming status and overall focus; he obsessively doodles eerie clusters of spiders and draws a disturbing map of his school’s floor plan.
From Los Angeles Times
Murmurations of birds swirl above rugged plains, landscapes shift into geometric compositions, and uncanny juxtapositions—a shirt dangling from a tree as a lone bird swoops by—lend seemingly simple pictures eerie characteristics.
And yet his abandoned undertaking is also a mischievous explosion of a storytelling format, a knowing critique of this most-wanted genre’s longstanding tropes: the eerie credit sequences, montages and music cues.
From Los Angeles Times
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.
