Ghastly

How to spell ghastly

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ghastly

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ghastly mean?

1. adjectiveCausing horror or great shock; extremely unpleasant or unwell-looking.

Ghastly in a sentence

• The report described the ghastly conditions inside the abandoned hospital.

• She felt ghastly after the long flight and skipped dinner.

Where does ghastly come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Ghastly goes back to the Middle English verb gasten, meaning 'to terrify' or 'to frighten', which itself descended from an Old English root tied to fear and sudden dread. The earliest spelling was simply 'gastly', with no silent letters at all, describing something so frightful it filled the onlooker with terror. The decorative 'gh' arrived only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when scribes reshaped the word by analogy with 'ghost' (a spelling that had itself picked up its 'gh' under Flemish and Dutch printing influence). Over time the sense softened from genuine supernatural terror to the everyday meaning of 'horrible, shocking, or unpleasant'. That borrowed 'gh', which has no sound of its own, is exactly the trap: it is there for historical company with 'ghost' rather than for any reason you can hear.

How the word is built

• ghast (from gasten: to terrify, frighten)
• -ly (adjective suffix)