- ghastly
- ghastly, grisly, gruesome, macabre, grim, lurid are comparable when they mean horrifying and repellent in appearance or aspect.Ghastly suggests the terrifying aspects of death or bloodshed{
the dying man's ghastly pallor
}{death grinned horrible a ghastly smile— Milton
}{the image of a hideous —of a ghastly thing —of the gallows!— Poe
}The term also is used as a strong intensive equivalent to hideous or horrifying{the growing conviction that the defeat was the result of a ghastly and unnecessary blunder}}
}{detail is heaped upon ghastly detail with a kind of stolid objectivity until the cumulative picture is one of madness and chaos— Edmund Fuller
}Grisly and gruesome imply an appearance that inspires shuddering or uncanny horror{so spake the grisly Terror— Milton
}{look down, and see a grisly sight; a vault where the bodies are buried upright!— Wordsworth
}{the thick 566-page text is literally horrible. It is filled with gruesome details of murder and torture— Bliven b. 1916
}{many readers find Keats's Isabella too gruesome for enjoyment
}Ma-cabre may imply marked or excessive preoccupation with the horrors especially of death{a macabre tale
}{weirdly masked, macabre figures that in time became . . . the hallmark of his painting— Coates
}or it may come close to ghastly in its implication of a hideous or horrifying quality{in a macabre climax, a substantial portion of Berlin was blown up by the Germans themselves— Wechsberg
}Grim suggests a fierce and forbidding aspect{so should a murderer look, so dead, so grim— Shak.
}{with countenance grim glared on him passing— Milton
}{an unused, airless attic, a place the reader soon begins to think of as no less grim than a chamber of horrors— Stern
}{the grim hows and not the difficult whys of battle— McCarten
}Lurid comes into comparison with ghastly as referring to light or color; it suggests either a ghastly pallor or coloring reminiscent of death{death . . . pale as yonder wan and horned moon, with lips of lurid blue— Shelley
}or more frequently a sinister and murky glow{he caught the color of what was passing about him but mixed with the lurid and portentous hue— Hawthorne
}{no lurid fire of hell or human passion illumines their scenes— Eliot
}Sometimes lurid differs little from gruesome except, possibly, in its stronger suggestion of sensationalism{reporters who like to give all the lurid details of a catastrophe
}{the detective story may be described as lurid rather than as mysterious
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
