Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Inspiring inexplicable fear, dread, or uneasiness; strange and frightening. synonym: weird.
  • adjective Scots Frightened or intimidated by superstition.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • See eery.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Serving to inspire fear, esp. a dread of seeing ghosts; wild; weird.
  • adjective Affected with fear; affrighted.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective strange, weird, fear-inspiring.
  • adjective Scotland fearful, timid.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective suggestive of the supernatural; mysterious
  • adjective inspiring a feeling of fear; strange and frightening

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English eri, fearful, from Old English earg, cowardly.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English eri ("fearful"), from Old English earg ("cowardly, fearful"). Akin to Scots ergh, argh from the same Old English source.

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Examples

Comments

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  • Along with llama one of the few words that if you drop either the first or the second letter results in a homonym. Many such as, say, wrack result in a homonym only in the instance of dropping the first letter--not the second.

    May 2, 2007