| Library / English Dictionary |
HAUNTING
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Continually recurring to the mind
Example:
the cathedral organ and the distant voices have a haunting beauty
Synonyms:
haunting; persistent
Classified under:
Similar:
unforgettable (impossible to forget)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Having a deeply disquieting or disturbing effect
Example:
from two handsome and talented young men to two haunting horrors of disintegration
Classified under:
Similar:
moving (arousing or capable of arousing deep emotion)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
-ing form of the verb haunt
Context examples:
His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more—the poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
