weird

(wîrd)

adj. weird·er, weird·est

1. Strikingly odd or unusual, especially in an unsettling way; strange: He lives in a weird old house on a dark street. Your neighbor is said to be a little weird. I felt a little weird after drinking that tea.

2. Suggestive of the supernatural: weird stories about ghosts.

3. Archaic Of or relating to fate or the Fates.

n. Archaic

1. Fate; destiny.

2. One's assigned lot or fortune, especially when evil.

tr. & intr.v. weird·ed, weird·ing, weirds

Slang To experience or cause to experience an odd, unusual, and sometimes uneasy sensation. Often used with out.

[Middle English werd, wird, fate (often in the pl. wirdes, the Fates), from Old English wyrd; see wer- in Indo-European roots.]

weird′ly adv.

weird′ness n.

Synonyms: weird, eerie, uncanny, unearthly
These adjectives refer to what is of a mysteriously strange, usually frightening nature. Weird may suggest the operation of supernatural influences, or merely the odd or unusual: "Nameless voices—weird sounds that awake in a Southern forest at twilight's approach,—were crying a sinister welcome to the settling gloom" (Kate Chopin)."The platypus ... seemed so weird when first discovered that a specimen sent to a museum was thought to be a hoax: bits of mammal and bits of bird stitched together" (Richard Dawkins).
Something eerie inspires fear or uneasiness and implies a sinister influence: "His white countenance was rendered eerie by the redness of the sagging lids below his eyes" (John Updike).
Uncanny refers to what is impossible to explain or accept: "My mother had an uncanny ability to see right through to my motives. At the time I wondered if she had ESP" (Porter Shreve).
Something unearthly seems so strange and unnatural as to come from or belong to another world: "The joy of having escaped death made the unearthly ruins of Hamburg seem more like a smoldering paradise than the purgatory other people thought our once lovely city had become" (Marione Ingram).

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

weirdness - strikingly out of the ordinary

bizarreness, outlandishness

strangeness, unfamiliarity - unusualness as a consequence of not being well known

Translations

غَرابَه

besynderlighed

Unheimliche

étrangeté

furcsa jellegkülönös jellegrejtelmes jelleg

annarleiki

selsomhet

acayiplik

古怪

weirdness

[ˈwɪə^rdnɪs] n → bizarrerie f

Collins English/French Electronic Resource. © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

weirdness

n (inf: = oddness) → Seltsamkeit f

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

weirdness

[ˈwɪədnɪs] n → stranezza

Collins Italian Dictionary 1st Edition © HarperCollins Publishers 1995

weird

(wiəd) adjective

odd or very strange. a weird story; She wears weird clothes.

ˈweirdly adverb

ˈweirdness noun

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

It might have been the weirdness of the typewriting that prevented the editors from accepting at least one little offering of mine.

View in context

He was alone, as was often the case when he visited the cabin, for the apes had no love for it; the story of the thunder-stick having lost nothing in the telling during these ten years had quite surrounded the white man's deserted abode with an atmosphere of weirdness and terror for the simians.

View in context

He could be heard getting up hurriedly, stumbling against something, and Levin saw, facing him in the doorway, the big, scared eyes, and the huge, thin, stooping figure of his brother, so familiar, and yet astonishing in it weirdness and sickliness.

View in context

Beneath the glorious effulgence of the two moons the scene was one of indescribable loveliness, tinged with the weirdness of strange enchantment.

View in context

Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion of a woman for a horse

View in context

There is a weirdness and uncanniness attaching to them.

View in context

Again and again the queen led the girl into the depths and out again, until the uncanny weirdness of the thing got on my nerves so that I could have leaped into the tank to the child's rescue had I not taken a firm hold of myself.

View in context

In his ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much dramatic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti, like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in the inner rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous.

View in context

But when that be- ing, parting with his black hands the long matted locks that hung before his face, as you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with glisten- ing, wild, black-and-white eyes, the weirdness of this silent encounter fairly staggered him.

View in context

One of the ship's boys (we had two), impressed by the weirdness of the scene, wept as if his heart would break.

View in context

It's the sort of weirdness that you have to dive headlong into ?

Go bonkers about saving the world

It's all hugely self-indulgent stuff from the creator, and indie film darling, Nicolas Winding Refn, but for some reason I can stop watching this blend of Quentin Tarantino ultraviolence and David Lynch weirdness.

ULTRAVIOLENT AND WEIRD