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
Related Words
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.
They tied the knot after Williams divorced Mount Eerie musician Phil Elverum in 2019 and Kail and actor Angela Christian went their separate ways.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 4, 2025
After breaking into a nearby school in New York's Eerie County for shelter, Jay Withey, 27, went back into the storm, searching for others.
From BBC • Dec. 30, 2022
Eerie chords ring out, as though warning viewers: This is not your “Real Housewives of Orange County.”
From Seattle Times • May 29, 2022
I’ve stumbled across Italo Calvino limited editions, a hardcover of William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” and a stash of musty, black-and-white comics magazines from the 1960s and ’70s that included Eerie, Creepy and Savage Tales.
From New York Times • Nov. 23, 2019
Eerie nine-hundred-year-old petroglyphs and pictographs decorate its sheer walls.
From "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
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.
