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unsettling

US/ənˈsɛtəlɪŋ/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,125 of 15,258neutral

Unsettling means making you uneasy without quite knowing why. An unsettling silence, unsettling news, deeply unsettling.

The vagueness is the point: unsettling is milder than frightening and harder to shake, because there is nothing definite to point at. It is a favourite word in reviews of horror and of art that works by suggestion. Note unsettle, and settle, in the sense of coming to rest.

Definitions of unsettling

  1. 1adjectiveunsettlingMaking you uneasy without quite knowing why.C1

    “There was something unsettling about the way the stranger kept smiling at us.”

    synonyms: disquieting, disconcerting

unsettling is a quality of unease.

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

unsettling in the wild

  • The nursery rhyme style gives an unusual effect to the strange or unsettling descriptions of a psychiatric hospital in the poem.

    Visits to St. Elizabeths

  • Although these grooves may look unsettling, the condition is usually painless.

    Fissured tongue

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.