How to Use ghastly in a Sentence

ghastly

adjective
  • His room was a ghastly mess.
  • You're making a ghastly mistake.
  • The burial pit was a ghastly scene.
    — Outside, 10 Dec. 2025
  • This last, ghastly gaffe might be too much for Obama to take.
    — Kyle Smith, National Review, 30 Aug. 2019
  • But the ghastly grit and chaos of this war is unlikely to be kind to a truce.
    — Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, 11 Mar. 2025
  • His naïveté was on full display, as well as his ghastly poor judgment.
    — Stephanie Nolasco , Ashley Papa, FOXNews.com, 6 May 2025
  • As the ghastly year dragged on, these streams of art and life kept converging.
    — Jessica Winter, New Yorker, 12 Dec. 2025
  • In a city filled with dark, ghastly tales, few are darker or ghastlier than this one.
    — Mike Scott, nola.com, 5 June 2019
  • The young and the old are hit hardest, but anyone can get this ghastly disease.
    — Ian Haydon, Philly.com, 26 June 2018
  • Not as some awful sort of ghastly skeleton with a scythe in its hand coming to chop us off.
    — Terry Gross, NPR, 15 Jan. 2026
  • Daryl tracked them to a quaint farmhouse with a ghastly walkway lined with guard walkers.
    — Charlie Mason, TVLine, 20 Oct. 2024
  • These women are more than happy to say ghastly things about each other on camera.
    — Judy Berman, Time, 5 Nov. 2025
  • Call him Harry Bosch but in Lebanon, a ghastly place at the time.
    — Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times, 20 July 2019
  • Yet where is their deep dive into the root cause analysis of this ghastly behavior in the first place?
    — Reader Commentary, Baltimore Sun, 22 Mar. 2024
  • Whether this is in fact the real world, or just some ghastly illusion, also remains to be seen.
    — Erik Kain, Forbes, 22 Sep. 2024
  • Threads supplied haunting, ghastly images of what those concepts would look like in the real world.
    — Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 10 July 2025
  • Behind one of these homes a ghastly discovery has recently been made.
    — Greg Dixon, NPR, 31 Dec. 2025
  • As the war rages, so does the button war, its victims paying every kind of ghastly price in a sober and sobering tale.
    — Meghan Cox Gurdon, WSJ, 8 June 2018
  • The market is just full of butcher shops, with the most ghastly whole pigs and halves of steers hanging from horrible hooks.
    — John Updike, New Yorker, 11 July 2025
  • As if being in space wasn't hard enough on an astronaut's body, they're forced to drink coffee in a ghastly manner.
    — Fox News, 9 June 2017
  • The house comes with some very bad mojo, and was the site of a ghastly murder of a previous family that lived there.
    — Randy Myers, The Mercury News, 20 Mar. 2025
  • Do your research, especially if the home's haunting is the result of a ghastly crime.
    — Jamie Wiebe, House Beautiful, 23 Oct. 2014
  • Soon after, Justine breaks out in a grotesque rash—the first in a series of ghastly reactions.
    — Jordan Hoffman, HWD, 9 Mar. 2017
  • Evidence of the ghastly injury is available in dozens of places on YouTube.
    — Ross Dellenger, SI.com, 27 June 2018
  • Nearby, a man crosses the street in what could be the ghastly heart of an endless New York summer.
    — Hilton Als, New Yorker, 10 Nov. 2025
  • But the most ghastly features of the play center are the messages baby will hear upon pushing the buttons.
    — Melissa Willets, Parents, 3 Jan. 2024
  • Behind one of these homes a ghastly discovery has recently been made and is now being unearthed.
    — Greg Dixon, NPR, 25 Aug. 2025
  • The horror short follows a young woman who makes a ghastly deal with a witch in exchange for her problematic boyfriend.
    — Alison Foreman, IndieWire, 15 Aug. 2025
  • Both publish videos exposing the ghastly acts of torture and violence that have come to define the group to the wider world.
    — Jackson Holahan, The Christian Science Monitor, 15 Aug. 2017
  • Looking back at some of those ghastly uniforms, Ben Zobrist’s black high-top spikes hardly seem like a crime.
    — Joe Knowles, chicagotribune.com, 22 May 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ghastly.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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