ghostly

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“
They seemed to swing past like fishes drifting across the glass window of an aquarium--ghostly, mysterious, and yet very real.

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Definitions (8)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. adjective Of, relating to, or resembling a ghost, a wraith, or an apparition; spectral.
  2. adjective Of or relating to the soul or spirit; spiritual.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (3)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (2)

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Examples (50)

  • Cloud-hidden and ghostly, the sun crept slowly above the horizon. —  Jacqueline Carey - Kushiel 02 - Kushiel's Chosen
  • The smell of it was ghostly, and Mrs Bradley, unimaginative where the supernatural was concerned, found herself speculating, with detached, analytical mind, upon the theories that ghosts materialize more easily in fog than in clear weather, and that the most dreadful apparitions are not those that wait upon the chimes of midnight, but those that emerge, sudden and silent, at noonday. —  Watson's Choice - Gladys Mitchell - Bradley 28 - 1955
  • The caged wall lights of the underground garage gave the car a ghostly, almost supernatural aura. —  Also by Lynda La Plante
  • He vanished in the darkness so silently that it was ghostly, and when they saw his flashlight beam dart, he was some distance away. —  076 - The Flaming Falcons
  • The shop in which she and her husband performed their daily stint was dim and ghostly, and peopled with suits of armor and Chinese mandarins, and enormous papier-mch birds suspended from the ceiling. —  The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories
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Related

Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

shadowy ·  eerie ·  ghastly ·  silvery ·  mysterious ·  misty ·  weird ·  faint ·  spectral ·  invisible ·  magical ·  bluish
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (2)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (2)

  1. With inserted h, as in ghost; from Middle English gostly, gostlich, earlier gastly, gastlich, from Anglo-Saxon gāstlīc, gæstlīc, of a spirit, spiritual (= Old Saxon gēstlīk = OFries. gāstlīk, gāstelīk, iestlik = Dutch geestelijk = Old High German geistlīh, Middle High German geistlīch, geislīch, German geistlich, spiritual, = Danish geistlig, clerical), from gāst, spirit, a spirit, + -līc, -ly.
  2. from Middle English gostly, goostli, from Anglo-Saxon gāstlīce, spiritually, from gāstlīc, spiritual: see ghostly, adjective
 

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/ˈgoʊstli/
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