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What is "uncanny"

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uncanny
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
uncanny
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
an uncanny knack (=an ability that seems surprising or strange)
▪ She has an uncanny knack for knowing what you're really thinking.
an uncanny resemblance (=noticeable and difficult to explain)
▪ I'd always thought that Jo and Freddie had an uncanny resemblance.
uncanny ability (=an unusual ability that is difficult to explain)
▪ He has an uncanny ability for spotting investment opportunities.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
ability
▪ Bonefish's real name was Hector, but he had earned his nickname because of his uncanny ability to find the elusive fish.
▪ And he has this uncanny ability to synthesize concepts from a few isolated observations.
▪ Anyone who worked with him recognised his uncanny ability to find something oddly heroic in all the manifestations of human weakness.
▪ Boilly had the uncanny ability to record the individual and the crowd simultaneously.
▪ Jack knew quite enough about her uncanny ability to choose the wrong men.
▪ A number of athletes have gained reputations for this uncanny ability.
accuracy
▪ It was starting to be unnerving, this ability of his to judge her with such uncanny accuracy!
▪ Again and again he was saved only by the uncanny accuracy of his shooting.
▪ He had predicted with uncanny accuracy the result of a snooker championship.
knack
▪ But like most of his colleagues in Hampden Babylon he had an uncanny knack of pushing the self-destruct button.
▪ He had a deep knowledge of the habits of all the local wildlife and an uncanny knack of befriending them.
▪ Keanu Reeves plays a criminal defense attorney who has an uncanny knack for picking sympathetic jurors.
▪ As some one said ... him and Strach had an uncanny knack of supporting each other when needed.
resemblance
▪ He was dressed in the garb of a Catholic priest and he bore an uncanny resemblance to the now legendary Spencer Tracy.
▪ The rumors bore an uncanny resemblance to whatever people feared most.
▪ One of the inn's habitués, a commercial traveller named Thomas Paufer, bore an uncanny resemblance to Johnson.
▪ Stack saw an uncanny resemblance to his fictional Josh.
▪ In the multi-tracked recording Mr Jarvis plays 99 roles, many of which bear an uncanny resemblance to well-known actors.
▪ The policies of central banks in the post-cold war years bear an uncanny resemblance to those of the 1920s.
▪ It was a face in fact which bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Jack Palance.
▪ There is an uncanny resemblance between this reasoning and that which had earlier led John Dalton to an atomic theory of chemistry.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ He has an uncanny ability to guess what you're thinking.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And he has this uncanny ability to synthesize concepts from a few isolated observations.
▪ He had an uncanny way of making me feel simple.
▪ He was dressed in the garb of a Catholic priest and he bore an uncanny resemblance to the now legendary Spencer Tracy.
▪ In one of the tales of the Arabian Nights the sovereign has the uncanny experience of meeting himself.
▪ It was the quietness that was so uncanny.
▪ Recovering his balance with uncanny speed, he snarled and launched himself after the still tumbling figure of his intended victim.
▪ Republicans concede that the president has an uncanny rhetorical talent that he has used effectively to put congressional leaders on the defensive.
▪ The rumors bore an uncanny resemblance to whatever people feared most.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Uncanny

Uncanny \Un*can"ny\, a. Not canny; unsafe; strange; weird; ghostly.
--Sir W. Scott. -- Un*can"ni*ness, n.
--G. Eliot.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
uncanny

1590s, "mischievous;" 1773 in the sense of "associated with the supernatural," originally Scottish and northern English, from un- (1) "not" + canny.

Wiktionary
uncanny

a. 1 strange, and mysteriously unsettling (as if supernatural); weird 2 (context UK dialectal English) careless. 3 (rfc-sense) (context psychology psychoanalysis Freud English) Simultaneously familiar and foreign, often uncomfortably so; ''translation of Freud's usage of the German "unheimlich" (literally "unsecret").''

Related phrases:
WordNet
uncanny

  1. adj. suggesting the operation of supernatural influences; "an eldritch screech"; "the three weird sisters"; "stumps...had uncanny shapes as of monstrous creatures"- John Galsworthy; "an unearthly light"; "he could hear the unearthly scream of some curlew piercing the din"- Henry Kingsley [syn: eldritch, weird, unearthly]

  2. beyond what is natural; "his uncanny sense of direction"; (`unco' is chiefly Scottish) [syn: unco]

Wikipedia
Uncanny

The psychological concept of the uncanny as something that is strangely familiar, rather than just mysterious, was perhaps first fixed by Sigmund Freud in his essay Das Unheimliche.

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it has been seen as creating cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize, as in the uncanny valley effect.

Uncanny (book)

Uncanny is the fourth in a series of collections of short stories by Australian author Paul Jennings. It was first released in 1988.

Uncanny (film)

Uncanny is a 2015 American science fiction film directed by Matthew Leutwyler and based on a screenplay by Shahin Chandrasoma. It is about the world's first "perfect" artificial intelligence ( David Clayton Rogers) that begins to exhibit startling and unnerving emergent behavior when a reporter ( Lucy Griffiths) begins a relationship with the scientist ( Mark Webber) who created it.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "uncanny".

The cadaver is shown from the waist up, so I cannot say whether Barbet dressed him Jesus-style in swaddling undergarments, but I can say that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the monologuist Spalding Gray.

He effectively excluded them beche wished to be taught by us, not volunteers- and as Dan had told me those many months ago, Stuart had an uncanny knack for getting to a person.

The side street was gloomy, deserted except for Beery Hosner and the man with the uncanny hand.

Elizabeth and Blanche walked to the garden with him but hardly tried to mask their conviction that he was only finding an excuse when he asked if they had been disturbed by any uncanny presence, while the air spirit was offended by the idea it had been lax in its attention.

Well past dawn, with the cookfire lit, and Fionn Areth beside him, he broached the sensitive discussion concerning the uncanny difficulties ahead.

With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

The uncanny defamiliarization effected by the Court takes place immediately, with the directedness of Freudian condensation and poetic metonymy, with the suddenness of the Freudian joke.

Then the face of Spirit came on: Forta, emulating her with uncanny precision.

It was the most uncanny thoroughfare conceivable--a sheer, sharp crack in the blue ice cliffs extending from where the sunlight shone in a dazzling golden band five hundred feet overhead to where bottom was touched in blue obscurity of the ice-foot.

It was uncanny, ghostlike, and even though Phil had never seen a corpse, he knew instinctively that this was the death pallor.

This Bali Hai had been built by Canadians, who seemed always to have an uncanny sense of which Florida beach was going to become popular next, but it was run by a pessimistic married couple from Maine who had spent one winter too many among the snowdrifts of that igloo.

But Omar, Harad, Beth and the uncanny black feline, Familiar, had rounded up the men responsible for trying to injure Beth and to steal her research.

But the Hinny surveyed him with such uncanny certainty that he could not protest further.

To him Lum betrayed an uncanny eye in discovering coal signs and tracing them to their hidden beds, and wide and valuable knowledge of the same.

Professor Mosk had not been particularly pleasant, but the instant Amuro had changed his attitude to one of deference, he had become so friendly that it was uncanny.