'spooked' is a correct and commonly used English word.
It is usually used to describe when someone is suddenly startled, scared, or scared away, often by something unseen or unknown. Example sentence: She was walking home in the dark when she heard a noise and it spooked her, so she ran back to her house.
Spooked by Ed Miliband's offer of a freeze, the Tories suggest that they want to crack down on the very green taxes that they voted for.
Though Eastwood's politics have been hard to pin down – in 2012 he gave a bizarre address to an empty chair intended to represent Obama at the Republican National convention – American Sniper is a much more avowedly patriotic, even bellicose, film than his previous Oscars-winners, Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby; a more reassuring watch in an America spooked by Isis.
I had to read it in two sittings because I was so utterly spooked.
Less frightened than others, perhaps, by the prospect of political change in choppy economic times, and indeed less spooked by the spectre let loose by the Tory campaign – the thought of London being held to ransom by unruly Scots.
The key for the SNP will be to emerge victorious in Scotland while making sure voters in the rest of the UK are not sufficiently spooked by this prospect to opt for the Conservatives over Labour.
Merkel gets spooked by the radical – and that's why this referendum idea is an abomination.
Perhaps he was trying to reassure those English voters spooked by the prospect of a Labour-SNP alliance.
England have been similarly spooked by high-quality spin bowling in the past, found to be lacking technically and temperamentally by Muttiah Muralitharan or Saeed Ajmal, but nobody calls you a coward on such occasions.
Smith and Holland were already a successful partnership, having worked on Z Cars and the popular nursing drama Angels, when they were approached by BBC executives spooked by the success of Channel 4's Brookside in the early 1980s.
The value of major Scottish companies has fallen by billions of pounds after the stock market was spooked by polling giving the yes vote a lead ahead of the referendum.
In interviews, Daft Punk have complained that the music industry, spooked by atomised audiences and falling revenues, played it safe – thus fearless, imaginative albums didn't sell, and those that did sell were neither fearless nor imaginative.
