Eerie is strange in a way that makes the back of your neck prickle. An empty playground at dusk, a house where every clock stopped at the same minute, a phone ringing in a room you know is empty.
The feeling is quiet rather than loud: eerie is not the jump in a horror film but the wrongness before it — an eerie silence, an eerie glow, an eerie calm after a storm. It also covers likeness too exact to be comfortable: an eerie resemblance, an eerie coincidence. The adverb eerily does a lot of work in writing: eerily quiet, eerily similar, eerily still. Two things to watch: the spelling is eerie, with the double e at the front, and the adverb is eerily, not eeriely.
1adjectiveeerieStrange and frightening in a quiet, ghostly way.
“An eerie light came from the window of the empty cottage.”
synonyms: uncanny, spooky, unsettling
2adjectiveuncannySo exact or so alike that it becomes unsettling.
“The boy bore an eerie resemblance to his grandfather at the same age.”
Also accepted in games: creepy, spooky
Eerie has changed sides. Middle English eri meant fearful, from Old English earg, cowardly or afraid, from Proto-Germanic *argaz — it described the person doing the trembling. Scots kept a version alive as argh. Somewhere along the way eerie swapped ends and now describes the thing that makes you tremble, rather than the one who trembles.
Proto-Germanic
*argaz
Proto-West Germanic
*arg
Old English
earg — cowardly, fearful
Middle English
eri — fearful
English, today
eerie
From Middle English eri (“fearful”), from Old English earg (“cowardly, fearful”), from Proto-West Germanic arg, from Proto-Germanic argaz. Akin to Scots argh from the same Old English source. a doublet of argh.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sharper Adjectives, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 26 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word