Uncanny means strange in a way that unsettles you. An uncanny resemblance, uncanny timing, an uncanny feeling.
The unsettling comes from something being almost right rather than plainly wrong, which is what the uncanny valley names — a face nearly human and not quite is more disturbing than an obvious cartoon. The canny in it is the Scots word for knowing.
1adjectiveuncannyStrange in a way that unsettles you.
“There was an uncanny silence in the forest, as if every bird had fled.”
uncanny is a quality of strangeness.
un-CANNY → a NANNY
In a photograph taken in 1910 the nanny holding the baby has your own face, down to the small mark on the chin, and nobody in the room will look at it twice.
hooks ontonanny
Un- plus canny, the Scots word meaning knowing or safe. Something uncanny is beyond what you know.
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵneh₃-
German
unheimlich
English, today
uncanny
From un- + canny; thus “beyond one's ken,” or outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions. Compare Middle English unkanne (“unknown”). In the noun sense a translation of Sigmund Freud's usage of German unheimlich (Das Unheimliche, 1919).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA