GHASTLINESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does ghastliness mean? 

• GHASTLINESS (noun)
  The noun GHASTLINESS has 1 sense:

1. the quality of being ghastly

  Familiarity information: GHASTLINESS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• GHASTLINESS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The quality of being ghastly

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

ghastliness; grimness; gruesomeness; luridness

Hypernyms ("ghastliness" is a kind of...):

frightfulness (the quality of being frightful)

Derivation:

ghastly (shockingly repellent; inspiring horror)

ghastly (gruesomely indicative of death or the dead)

 Context examples 

He laughed loudly at his own sally, but Hans's face was frozen into a sullen ghastliness that nothing less than the trump of doom could have broken.

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

Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or two between them.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Oh, Adele will go to school—I have settled that already; nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield Hall—this accursed place—this tent of Achan—this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky—this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)