weird

weird, eerie, uncanny can all mean fearfully and mysteriously strange or fantastic.

Weird may be used in the sense of unearthly or preternaturally mysterious

{

when night makes a weird sound of its own stillness— Shelley

}

{

weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand— Tennyson

}

or it may mean little more than strangely or absurdly queer

{

had somehow absorbed ... a weird mixture of the irresponsible, megalomaniacal ideas which erupted from German thinkers during the nineteenth century— Shirer

}

Eerie does not connote ordinary justifiable or explainable fear but rather a vague consciousness that unearthly or mysterious and often malign powers or influences are at work; the term is used chiefly to create atmosphere rather than to define the character of the thing so described

{

found awe creeping over her as her brother's voice filled the vault of the temple, chanting words thousands of years old, in an eerie melody from a dim lost time— Wouk

}

Uncanny has in general use an implication of uncomfortable strangeness or of unpleasant mysteriousness that makes it applicable not only to persons or concrete things but to abstractions (as sensations, feelings, or thoughts)

{

the alien elements of the Soviet Union affect him as disquieting, uncanny, because they turn up in fusion with pretenses at Western discipline, Western logic— Edmund Wilson

}

Analogous words: *mysterious, inscrutable: *fearful, awful, dreadful, horrific: *strange, odd, queer, curious, peculiar