unearthly means not of the earth; nonterrestrial. It carries an Arena rating of 1478, earned across 2 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, unearthly ranks #1,266 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #1,317 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #2,457 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #5,962 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words.
unearthly is pronounced /ʌnˈɜːθ.li/.
Why “unearthly” is a great word
Existing or seeming to originate from a sphere utterly alien to our own, possessing a supernatural, mystifying, or extraordinarily bizarre character. From the English prefix un- ("not") + earthly ("of the earth"), first attested in the 1610s in the sense 'heavenly, sublime'; the sense of 'ghostly, weird' is attested by 1802. Unlike "ethereal," which suggests a delicate, heavenly beauty, or "uncanny," which describes the strangely familiar and intellectually unsettling, "unearthly" conveys a profound and often disquieting estrangement from the terrestrial realm. It is the cold, corpse-light of a will-o'-the-wisp hovering over a peat bog, the inhuman geometry of a seed pod from an unknown star, or the silence that falls in a deep wood—not a mere absence of sound, but a positive, listening quiet from another world, as if the world briefly wore a skin not its own.
Etymology
From un- + earthly.
adj
- Not of the earth; nonterrestrial.e.g.“They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.” — 1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 205:
- Preternatural or supernatural.e.g.“I believe that we are the last human beings who will ever see that unearthly sight.” — 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:
- Strange, enigmatic, or mysterious.e.g.“I then set out to survey the town in the self-same palankeen. The houses had all of them an unearthly appearance, by no means consonant to our ideas of Oriental splendor.” — 1819, [publ. Sep 1858], James Morton, “The Poetical Remains of the late Dr. John Leyden, with Memoirs of his Life”, in The Calcutta Review, volume 31, page 25:
- Ideal beyond the mundane.e.g.“By the late sixteenth century Elizabeth had become the icon-like Virgin Queen of legend, an image created, to a large extent, by her extraordinary, unearthly costume and appearance.” — 2000, Aileen Ribeiro, The Gallery of Fashion, page 42:
- Ridiculous, ludicrous, or outrageous.e.g.“I see my boys all wearing the same unearthly trousers, the same hair cuts, garish ties and sweaters, all rolling their socks and entertaining the same crazy notions about everything.” — 1927, The Walther League Messenger, volume 36, page 225:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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