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say it: GAST-lee
ghastly is an adjective meaning "shockingly repellent; inspiring horror". It carries 2 recorded senses.
shockingly repellent; inspiring horror
“ghastly wounds”
“the grim aftermath of the bombing”
“the grim task of burying the victims”
“a grisly murder”
“gruesome evidence of human sacrifice”
“macabre tales of war and plague in the Middle ages”
“macabre tortures conceived by madmen”
gruesomely indicative of death or the dead
“a charnel smell came from the chest filled with dead men's bones”
“ghastly shrieks”
“the sepulchral darkness of the catacombs”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for ghastly come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.