uncanny
- 01 C2 Proficiency
the strange feeling you get when something familiar looks slightly wrong or scary.
the psychological experience of something being simultaneously familiar and alien, resulting in a sense of cognitive dissonance or discomfort.
Simple“The movie uses the uncanny to make the audience feel uneasy.”
In context“Freud's essay on the uncanny explores how the return of repressed childhood fears can make everyday objects seem threateningly strange.”
Synonymsunsettlingness
“The narrative floats just above the surface of the everyday, a world where trauma transforms the mundane into something uncanny.”
“Dark tourism research reveals that people are drawn to places associated with death, disaster, tragedy and the uncanny, whether former prisons, abandoned sites, or locations connected to unsettling historical events.”
From un- + canny; thus “beyond one's ken,” or outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions. Compare Middle English unkanne (“unknown”). In the noun sense a translation of Sigmund Freud's usage of German unheimlich (Das Unheimliche, 1919).
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.