eerie: [13] Eerie seems to come ultimately from Old English earg ‘cowardly’, a descendant of prehistoric Germanic *arg-, although the connection has not been established for certain. It emerged in Scotland and northern England in the 13th century in the sense ‘cowardly, fearful’, and it was not until the 18th century that it began to veer round semantically from ‘afraid’ to ‘causing fear’. Burns was one of the first to use it so in print: ‘Be thou a bogle by the eerie side of an auld thorn’. In the course of the 19th century its use gradually spread further south to become general English.
