Ghastly
//ˈɡɑːs(t).li// adj, adv
adj, adv ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
Adjective
- 1 Like a ghost in appearance; death-like; pale; pallid; dismal.
"Each turned his face with a ghastly pang."
- 2 Horrifyingly shocking.
"Mangled with ghastly wounds through plate and mail."
- 3 Extremely bad.
"The play was simply ghastly."
Adjective
- 1 shockingly repellent; inspiring horror wordnet
- 2 gruesomely indicative of death or the dead wordnet
Adverb
- 1 In a ghastly manner.
"Her face was ghastly pale, and perhaps rendered still more so by the blueish light of the fire."
Example
More examples"He could not by any means tolerate the ghastly smell of rotting onion."
Etymology
From a conflation of gastly, from Middle English gastly, from gasten (from Old English gǣstan (“to torment, frighten”)) + -ly, and ghostly (which was also spelt gastlich in Middle English). Equivalent to ghast/gast + -ly. Spelling with gh developed in the 16th century due to the conflation.
More for "ghastly"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.