gruesome

adj

1. Repellently frightful and shocking; ghastly, horrific.

   “He taks a ſvvirlie, auld moſs-oak, / For ſome black, grouſome Carlin; […]”

   “There's a wheen German horse doun at Glasgow yonder; they ca' their commander Wittybody, or some sic name, though he's as grave and grewsome an auld Dutchman as e'er I saw.”

   “With many a grausome shape unutterable, / Limn'd were the cavernous sepulchral walls; […]”

   “He has taken a bride / To his gruesome side, / That's as fair as himself is bold: […]”

   “[T]hey packed him [a dead duck] and sealed him up in brown paper, and put him in the cupboard of an unoccupied study, where he was found in the holidays by the matron, a grewsome body.”

2. (broadly, informal)Awful, terrible.

   “The team was so unprepared that the way it played was just gruesome.”

3. (archaic, rare)Of a person: filled with fear; afraid, fearful.

   “Then says I to myself,—"John Ridd, these trees, and pools, and lonesome rocks, and setting of the sunlight, are making a gruesome coward of thee. Shall I go back to my mother so, and be called her fearless boy?"”

   “Some of his [Nathaniel Hawthorne's] companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes.”