Meaning & use
unnerving
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Meaning
adjectivecomparable
Making you feel uneasy, frightened or less confident.
Grammar: Describes a thing or situation that causes the feeling: an unnerving silence.
Patterns
- an unnerving experience
- find something unnerving
The sudden silence in the house was unnerving.
I found the way he stared at me unnerving.
It is unnerving to walk through the empty hospital at night.
Word forms
| comparative | more unnerving |
|---|---|
| superlative | most unnerving |
Common combinations
- unnerving silence
- An unnerving silence followed the crash.
- deeply unnerving
- The call was deeply unnerving.
- find it unnerving
- Many people find it unnerving to speak in public.
- unnerving calm
- His unnerving calm worried the others.
- unnerving experience
- Being followed home was an unnerving experience.
Synonyms and how they differ
- disturbing
- Disturbing is broader and can describe something upsetting or shocking, while unnerving centers on losing calm.
- unsettling
- Unsettling is very close, but stresses a lingering unease rather than a sharp jolt of fear.
- daunting
- Daunting describes a task that seems too large to face, not an eerie or tense moment.
- alarming
- Alarming suggests danger or a reason to worry, while unnerving describes feeling thrown off balance.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: unnerving or unnerved?
unnerving vs unnerved
Unnerved describes the person who feels shaken; unnerving describes the thing that causes the feeling.
Practice
Which word completes the sentence correctly? The strange sounds from the empty room were ____.
Choose one answer.
Unnerving is the adjective that describes the sounds. Unnerved would describe a person who feels shaken, which does not fit sounds.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “unnerving”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.