Other forms: hauntings
Haunting means beautiful in a way that will not leave you alone afterwards. A tune from a film you heard once and hummed all week, a photograph of an empty house with the door open, a voice that follows you home.
It is not frightening, and that is the trap: a haunting melody is sad and lovely, not scary — the ghosts are only in the metaphor. It goes with the same nouns again and again: a haunting melody, a haunting image, haunting beauty, a haunting performance. The adverb is hauntingly, as in hauntingly familiar. There is a plain noun too, a haunting, which does mean ghosts visiting a place. And it is the -ing form of the verb haunt, so a mistake can haunt you for years.
1adjectivehauntingBeautiful or sad in a way that stays in your mind long afterwards.~54%
“The film ends with a haunting shot of the empty beach.”
synonyms: evocative, poignant, unforgettable
2nounrepeatedThe repeated appearance of a ghost in a place.~46%
“The book collects local stories of hauntings and strange lights.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱey-
Proto-Germanic
*haimatjaną — to house, bring home
Old English
hāmettan — to bring home; house; cohabit with
Old Norse
heimta — to bring home, fetch
fro-nor
hanter — to go back home, frequent
Old French
hanter — to inhabit, frequent, resort to
Middle English
haunten — to reside, inhabit, use, employ
English
haunt
English, today
haunting
haunt comes from Middle English haunten (“to reside, inhabit, use, employ”), from Old French hanter (“to inhabit, frequent, resort to”), from fro-nor hanter (“to go back home, frequent”), from Old Norse heimta (“to bring home, fetch”) or/and from Old English hāmettan (“to bring home; house; cohabit with”); both from Proto-Germanic haimatjaną (“to house, bring home”), from Proto-Germanic haimaz (“village, home”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱóymos (“village”). Cognate with Old English hǣman (“to cohabit, lie with, marry”); related to Old English hām (“home, village”), Old French hantin (“a stay, a place frequented by”) from the same Germanic source. Another descendant from the French is Dutch hanteren, whence German hantieren, Swedish hantera, Danish håndtere. More at home.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA