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Eerie vs Spookish - What's the difference?

eerie | spookish |

As adjectives the difference between eerie and spookish

is that eerie is strange, weird, fear-inspiring while spookish is (informal) frightening or unnerving in the manner of something eerie or supernatural; spooky.

eerie

English

Alternative forms

* eery

Adjective

(er)
  • strange, weird, fear-inspiring.
  • The eerie sounds seemed to come from the graveyard after midnight.
  • (Scotland) fearful, timid.
  • * 1883 , George MacDonald, Donal Grant
  • She began to feel eerie .

    Synonyms

    * See also * creepy, spooky

    Derived terms

    * eerily (adverb) * eeriness (noun) * eerisome

    spookish

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • (informal) Frightening or unnerving in the manner of something eerie or supernatural; spooky.
  • * 1914 , , Dave Porter in the Gold Fields , ch. 22:
  • I hope we find some nicer spot than this. This looks so lonely and spookish .
  • * 1930 , , Treatise on the Gods (2006 edition), ISBN 9780801885365, pp. 174-5:
  • Religion is everywhere a gauge of respectability. . . . The right to participate, however humbly, in His august and transcendental operations offers a powerful satisfaction to the will to power; the same privilege, on a smaller scale, is what takes hordes of human blanks into the Freemasons and other such spookish amalgamations of nonentities.
  • (informal, often of a horse or other animal) Easily startled, frightened, or unnerved.
  • * 1908 , Sylvester Barbour, Reminiscences (2009 edition), ISBN 9781115996655, p. 26:
  • In those moments thus spent in composing myself for sleep, I sometimes wondered in the last human occupant of the room were not a dead one. I was senselessly spookish about such things.
  • * 2010 , " Sarah $3000", isoldmyhorse.com (retrieved 13 July 2010):
  • As a lesson horse she needs to gain confidence in her rider, or can become spookish over the jumps, dodging out of them.

    Synonyms

    * (easily startled or frightened) skittish

    References

    *Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd ed., 1989.