HAUNTING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does haunting mean? 

• HAUNTING (adjective)
  The adjective HAUNTING has 2 senses:

1. continually recurring to the mind

2. having a deeply disquieting or disturbing effect

  Familiarity information: HAUNTING used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• HAUNTING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Continually recurring to the mind

Synonyms:

haunting; persistent

Context example:

the cathedral organ and the distant voices have a haunting beauty

Similar:

unforgettable (impossible to forget)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Having a deeply disquieting or disturbing effect

Context example:

from two handsome and talented young men to two haunting horrors of disintegration

Similar:

moving (arousing or capable of arousing deep emotion)

 Context examples 

To have her haunting the Abbey, and thanking him all day long for his great kindness in marrying Jane?

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

He looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a haunting expression, the ghost of some buried misery achieving swift resurrection.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

After this Amy subsided, till a mania for sketching from nature set her to haunting river, field, and wood, for picturesque studies, and sighing for ruins to copy.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I feel a wonderful peace and rest to-night. It is as if some haunting presence were removed from me. Perhaps ...

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

I involuntarily shunned the thought of it, and yet the thought continually arose in my mind like a haunting spectre.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

It seemed a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he was rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

All day yesterday I was very busy, and very happy in my ceaseless bustle; for I am not, as you seem to think, troubled by any haunting fears about the new sphere, et cetera: I think it a glorious thing to have the hope of living with you, because I love you.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

It is, I suppose, the reaction from the haunting fear which I have had: that this terrible affair and the reopening of his old wound might act detrimentally on Jonathan.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance: besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade—the sweet charm of freshness would leave it.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)