eerie
Americanadjective
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uncanny, so as to inspire superstitious fear; weird
an eerie midnight howl.
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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
The song hit the Billboard top ten, and recently resurfaced in a slow, eerie remix for Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror film “Us.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 17, 2026
There are eerie parallels between this year’s campaign and the contest 20 years ago, when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress while gaining six governorships.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 17, 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
A group of female Finnish pirates invented it back in the fifteenth century, and named it the Devil’s Tongue because it twisted this way and that, in a most complicated and eerie way.
From "The Bad Beginning" by Lemony Snicket
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
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
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
But eerier far, when the spring-land rejoices, And laughs back to heaven with gratitude bright, To hearken, and naewhere hear sweet human voices When man's soul is dark in the season o' light!
From The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century by Charles Rogers
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
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.
