spookish
adjEtymology From spook + -ish.
1
Informal Frightening or unnerving in the manner of something eerie or supernatural; spooky.
- I hope we find some nicer spot than this. This looks so lonely and spookish.1914, Edward Stratemeyer, chapter 22, in Dave Porter in the Gold Fields:
- 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.1930, H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, published 2006, →ISBN, pages 174–5:
2
Informal, Often Easily startled, frightened, or unnerved.
Of a horse or other animal
- 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.1908, Sylvester Barbour, Reminiscences, published 2009, →ISBN, page 26:
- As a lesson horse she needs to gain confidence in her rider, or can become spookish over the jumps, dodging out of them.2010, “Sarah $3000”, in isoldmyhorse.com, retrieved 13 Jul 2010:
- Synonyms
- skittish
- Derived terms
- spookishly