The Greek word deinos fuses wonderful, formidable, and terrible.

Evidence

70 ‘Thin stammering’ and ‘The manifold uncanny’: Heidegger & Jaspers, The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, 151 (Heidegger to Jaspers, 1 July 1935). This is the ‘Ode on Man’ chorus from Sophocles, Antigone V, 332–75, this 332. Heidegger’s German version is: ‘Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch / über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt’ (GA, 13, 35). The line could be rendered more conventionally as ‘Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man’ (tr. R. C. Jebb) or ‘Many things are formidable, and none more formidable than man!’ (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones). The word translated as ‘formidable’ or ‘wonderful’ is deinà (deinos), also meaning ‘terrible’; it features in Heidegger’s later discussions of technology. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1326

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illuminates why Heidegger translates the Antigone chorus as ‘unheimlich’ — the uncanny — from a word that also carries ‘terrible’.