These words all refer to behaviour, appearance or people considered out of the ordinary, strange or unusual. Something deemed queer is not only strange but often bizarre and inexplicable.

• It was queer how the TV picture kept disappearing and reappearing even though the house lights didn’t flicker; a queer scraping sound, as though something were trying to get in the door.

Queer emphasizes both the singularity and strangeness of the event: a queer accident in which nobody was hurt but both cars were write-offs. (Compare "freak accident," which implies that the cause of the accident was a bizarre product of chance.) Queer is now often used in a slang sense in reference to homosexuals.

Odd and peculiar are closely allied in popular use and are interchangeable in these contexts, but the basic meaning of peculiar is having a unique or special character; oddness or eccentricity is neither central nor necessary to its meaning.

• Great minds generally look at life in a way peculiar to themselves; A peculiarly apt choice of words.

The more popular meaning of strange or odd has been derived from this sense: a peculiar habit of scratching his ear while he talked. But not that even here peculiar does not necessarily imply oddness; whether the habit is to be thought of as merely distinctive or as unusual to the point of being eccentric depends upon the larger context. Odd may be used for slight or extremely unusual qualities of behaviour or appearance; it stresses deviation from the normal, ordinary or expected: He was more than a little odd , very fastidious about his manners but an incredibly sloppy dresser.

Funny may be an informal word for peculiar or remarkable.

• That’s funny ; I could have sworn I was wearing a hat when I came in here.

Sometimes funny suggests an endearing or winning quality: a funny way of wrinkling her nose. Crazy , a word never used by psychiatrists except in jest, means mad or insane: He was acting in a crazy way, throwing up his hands and singing, then yelling that somebody was murdering him. Nowadays the word is probably more often used to mean acting as if mad, or simply unconventional, off-beat or hard to understand: a crazy driver, weaving in and out of traffic; Pushing a car is a crazy thing to do when you have a weak heart.