GHOSTLY (ghostlier, ghostliest)

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

Irregular inflected forms: ghostlier    , ghostliest   

 Dictionary entry overview: What does ghostly mean? 

• GHOSTLY (adjective)
  The adjective GHOSTLY has 1 sense:

1. resembling or characteristic of a phantom

  Familiarity information: GHOSTLY used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• GHOSTLY (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Resembling or characteristic of a phantom

Synonyms:

apparitional; ghostlike; ghostly; phantasmal; spectral; spiritual

Context example:

spiritual tappings at a seance

Similar:

supernatural (not existing in nature or subject to explanation according to natural laws; not physical or material)

Derivation:

ghost (the visible disembodied soul of a dead person)

ghostliness (strangeness by virtue of being mysterious and inspiring fear)

 Context examples 

Night came on, and a full moon rose high over the trees into the sky, lighting the land till it lay bathed in ghostly day.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

The ghostly galaxy doesn't have a noticeable central region, or even spiral arms and a disk, typical features of a spiral galaxy.

(Dark Matter Goes Missing in Oddball Galaxy, NASA)

The dark face of the Moon has a faint shine, a ghostly version of a full Moon.

(Earthshine, NASA)

A return to clay and plaster followed, and ghostly casts of her acquaintances haunted corners of the house, or tumbled off closet shelves onto people's heads.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

The phantom shapes, which were becoming gradually materialised from the moonbeams, were those of the three ghostly women to whom I was doomed.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o'clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

This gave them the seeming of ghostly masques, undertakers in a spectral world at the funeral of some ghost.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

It was two in the afternoon, and a ghostly twilight, shot through by wandering purplish lights, had descended upon us.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

But oh, what a clammy hand his was! as ghostly to the touch as to the sight!

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)