Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The character of being uncanny.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state or condition of being uncanny.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word uncanniness.

Examples

  • More uncanniness is also revealed on the site, with reality mirroring science fiction, including a Sixth Day of the Sixth Month of the Sixth year timing of Al Gore's global warming film gala in DC relative to the moment in time when the Supreme Court removed all possibility of his becoming the 43rd President.

    SF Tidbits for 6/7/06 2006

  • While I don't think it's bridged the uncanny valley, finding the "uncanniness" in this screening was like to trying to spot dead pixels on an HD television.

    Avatar Day Footage - What Did You Think? | /Film 2009

  • Being one of the fortunate ones, I also feel the uncanniness of being insulated from it all.

    survivor guilt Another Outspoken Female 2009

  • “The knowledge of this fact on the part of the uncircumcised,” Fenichel writes, “has undoubtedly increased the feeling of uncanniness which the Jew gives them.”

    Bloodlust Russell Jacoby 2011

  • “The knowledge of this fact on the part of the uncircumcised,” Fenichel writes, “has undoubtedly increased the feeling of uncanniness which the Jew gives them.”

    Bloodlust Russell Jacoby 2011

  • But in my own case it's not so much fear of the unknown that drives me as it is a sense of numinous uncanniness, verging into Rudolf Otto's "daemonic dread," at the very fact of existence itself -- which, crucially, includes not just the disenchanted world of physical nature that's visible to empirical science but the world of immediate, first-person experience with all of its daimonic psychological oddities.

    Dark Awakenings and Cosmic Horror : The Lovecraft News Network 2010

  • Likewise, the analysis may have been complicated by the rise of transmedia storytelling in which the boundaries of a particular narrative are very hard to define, so the uncanniness of comic art may be the prototype for things to come.

    Archive 2009-01-01 Rebecca Tushnet 2009

  • But in my own case it's not so much fear of the unknown that drives me as it is a sense of numinous uncanniness, verging into Rudolf Otto's "daemonic dread," at the very fact of existence itself -- which, crucially, includes not just the disenchanted world of physical nature that's visible to empirical science but the world of immediate, first-person experience with all of its daimonic psychological oddities.

    Archive 2010-03-01 2010

  • In The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing (1988), the uncanniness of pregnancy is laid bare.

    Author, author: Joanna Kavenna Joanna Kavenna 2010

  • The single word it had spoken made the animal heavier somehow, as if its uncanniness were something solid.

    Behemoth Mr. Scott Westerfeld 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.