Ghastly

How to spell ghastly

7 letters · 2 syllables

23 of the 106 people asked to spell ghastly in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is gastly. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

gastly ghastly

What people typed instead

• gastly16 people
• gasty3 people

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)

People who misspell ghastly also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got ghastly wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• butte 100% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 93% of them got it wrong