eldritch
- 1Eerie and unearthly, seeming to belong to a world beyond the natural one.
Somewhere below the cliffs, an eldritch shriek rose above the wind.
Horror fans love the author's eldritch creatures from beyond the stars.
Similareerie, unearthly, uncanny, otherworldly, weird
Note
Its strangeness may be built in: -ritch is usually traced to Old English rīċe, "kingdom", and el- perhaps to a root meaning "other", kin to else, giving something like "of the other realm". The word has a long habit of fastening onto sounds: the witches' eldritch screech in Burns's Tam o' Shanter, Pearl's eldritch scream in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, an eldritch sing-song in Stevenson's Kidnapped.
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Origin
From the earlier form elritch, of uncertain origin. The second part, -ritch, is generally taken to be Old English rīċe ("realm, kingdom"); the first part, el-, may come from an Old English root meaning "foreign, strange, other" (related to else), or from elf. The writings of H. P. Lovecraft brought it back into popular literature.