eerie
pronunciation
How to pronounce eerie in British English:
UK [ˈɪəri]
How to pronounce eerie in American English:
US [ˈɪri]
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- Adjective:
- suggestive of the supernatural; mysterious
- so strange as to inspire a feeling of fear
Word Origin
- eerie
- eerie: [13] Eerie seems to come ultimately from Old English earg ‘cowardly’, a descendant of prehistoric Germanic *arg-, although the connection has not been established for certain. It emerged in Scotland and northern England in the 13th century in the sense ‘cowardly, fearful’, and it was not until the 18th century that it began to veer round semantically from ‘afraid’ to ‘causing fear’. Burns was one of the first to use it so in print: ‘Be thou a bogle by the eerie side of an auld thorn’. In the course of the 19th century its use gradually spread further south to become general English.
- eerie (adj.)
- also eery, c. 1300, "timid, affected by superstitious fear," north England and Scottish variant of Old English earg "cowardly, fearful, craven, vile, wretched, useless," from Proto-Germanic *argaz (cognates: Old Frisian erg "evil, bad," Middle Dutch arch "bad," Dutch arg, Old High German arg "cowardly, worthless," German arg "bad, wicked," Old Norse argr "unmanly, voluptuous," Swedish arg "malicious"). Sense of "causing fear because of strangeness" is first attested 1792. Finnish arka "cowardly" is a Germanic loan-word.
Example
- 1. The office is an eerie place at night .
- 2. The summer of 2012 offers an eerie echo of 2008 .
- 3. Quiver trees stand like eerie sentinels under the stars in the namib desert .
- 4. But under the cover of darkness , she can glow an eerie green .
- 5. We arrived at the top just at sunrise to see the mountain casting its eerie shadow onto the mist below .