macabre (muh-kah-bruh) - adjective

Macabre means " gruesome and horrifying; ghastly; horrible."

First used in the written form around 1400–1450. Macabre is now generally used for "ghastly," but that is a late 19th-century development. It originated in the very specific phrase dance macabre, which denoted a dance in which a figure representing death enticed people to dance with him until they dropped down dead. This was borrowed from the French danse macabre, which was probably an alteration of an earlier danse Macabe. This in turn was a translation of medieval Latin chorea Machabaeorum (dance of the Maccabees), which is thought originally to have referred to a stylized representation of the slaughter of the Maccabees (a Jewish dynasty of biblical times) in a medieval miracle play.

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