Something macabre is strange and unpleasant in a dark way: it is tied to death, to graves, or to people being badly hurt, sometimes with a cold kind of joke. A story that lingers on bones, a film that laughs at a funeral, a picture that seems too interested in blood — those can be macabre. It is a rather bookish or newspaper word. Friends telling a spooky story would more often say creepy or horrible. You can have a macabre joke or a macabre scene. It does not just mean “scary.” A fast ride can scare you without being macabre; the death-or-injury colour is what the word carries. English borrowed it from French macabre. Where French got it is not settled: the usual story ties it to danse macabre, “the dance of death,” perhaps from the biblical name Maccabees; another story takes it from an Arabic word for cemeteries. Scholars do not agree, so that is as far as a careful teacher should go.