macabre

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“
New Yorker cartoons, the world of the macabre is at its best when juxtaposed with the world of the normal people, something at which this manga series is very good.

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Definitions (5)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. adjective Suggesting the horror of death and decay; gruesome: macabre tales of war and plague in the Middle Ages. See Synonyms at ghastly.
  2. adjective Constituting or including a representation of death.
  3. Word History
    The word macabre is an excellent example of a word formed with reference to a specific context that has long since disappeared for everyone but scholars. Macabre is first recorded in the phrase Macabrees daunce in a work written around 1430 by John Lydgate. Macabree was thought by Lydgate to be the name of a French author, but in fact he misunderstood the Old French phrase Danse Macabre, "the Dance of Death,” a subject of art and literature. In this dance, Death leads people of all classes and walks of life to the same final end. The macabre element may be an alteration of Macabe, "a Maccabee.” The Maccabees were Jewish martyrs who were honored by a feast throughout the Western Church, and reverence for them was linked to reverence for the dead. Today macabre has no connection with the Maccabees and little connection with the Dance of Death, but it still has to do with death.

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Examples

  • I sensed in him a tendency to enjoy the macabre, and I knew that whatever happened, he must not be allowed to write about my mother. —  The Turquoise Mask
  • New Yorker cartoons, the world of the macabre is at its best when juxtaposed with the world of the normal people, something at which this manga series is very good. —  comicbookbin.com
  • Extra batteries for the laser sight. —  Time Scout
  • He pointed. —  A Canticle for Leibowitz
  • 1850, and thereafter to read and excerpt more selectively as the volume of material became more extensive "(p. xxi). —  VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol X No 2
 

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Words tagged macabre

penetralia · mortshire · west elbow · collapsed pudding · crumbath cyclery · dingy cruet, blots · nether postlude

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Macabre has been looked up 845 times, favorited 10 times, listed 162 times, and commented on 7 times.

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

Used in the same context Used in the Same Context

gruesome ·  bizarre ·  horrify ·  surreal ·  ghoulish ·  wry ·  ironic ·  spooky ·  frighten ·  hilarious ·  nightmarish ·  comical
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 (1)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Ultimately from Old French (Danse) Macabre, (dance) of death, perhaps alteration of Macabe, Maccabee, from Latin Maccabaeus, from Greek Makkabios.
 

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