eerie
Americanadjective
-
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:
The South later resumed border loudspeaker broadcasts for the first time in six years, including K-pop and international news, while the North began transmitting strange, eerie sounds across the frontier, unsettling South Korean residents.
From Barron's ● Oct. 20, 2026
The production’s novelty: Audience members wear headphones, so we hear Lucas’s voice more intimately, and also the creaks and thumps and eerie noises that enhance the chilling tale.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 15, 2026
Heck, Bernard Herrmann’s eerie theme song alone will outlive humanity.
From Salon ● Oct. 10, 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
A beautiful theory will be simple, compact, and spare; it will give a sense of completeness and often an eerie sense of symmetry.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
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
From The Carpenter’s version of “Superstar” during the show, the finale shifted to the eerier cover by Sonic Youth.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 15, 2022
Even eerier was the lead story, about Adolf Hitler and the rise of his Third Reich.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 26, 2021
A stalwart of the LA psychedelic scene who has played with musicians including Ariel Pink and Tim Presley, Jack Name’s own music is eerier than that of his energetic peers.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 27, 2019
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
The eeriest costume this Halloween season would be Aunt Gladys, with her odd copper wig, oversized sunglasses, blue eyeshadow, and smeary red lipstick.
From Slate ● Oct. 31, 2025
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
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
The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.
From "The Son of Neptune" by Rick Riordan
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
