imaginary

imaginary adj

1 Imaginary, fanciful, visionary, fantastic, chimerical, quixotic are comparable when they are applied to conceptions or to the persons who form the conceptions and mean unreal or unbelievable and out of keeping with things as they are or conceiving such unreal or unbelievable things.

Something is imaginary which is fictitious and purely the product of an active or an excited imagination

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imaginary ills and fancied tortures— Addison

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those nervous persons who may be terrified by imaginary dangers are often courageous in the face of real danger— Ellis

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Something is or, less often, one is fanciful which or who indicates a giving rein to the power of conceiving or producing things that have no real counterpart in nature or in fact

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in Wales he found a cottage perfectly roofed with fern .... Had a painter put this in a picture, many would have exclaimed: "How fanciful!"—Jefferies

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Rousseau's fanciful image of primitive man, uncontaminated by science or art, undepraved by thought— Grandgent

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Something is visionary which, although it seems real and practical to the one who conceives it, is usually the product of a dream or vision or of an unrestrained imagination and is incapable of realization

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visionary schemes for world conquest

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Goldsmith had long a visionary project, that... he would go to Aleppo, in order to acquire a knowledge ... of any arts peculiar to the East, and introduce them into Britain— Boswell

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this was a visionary scheme ... a project far above his skill— Swift

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One is visionary who is given to such dreams, visions, and fancies and inspired by the hopes they arouse

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if a man happens not to succeed in such an enquiry, he will be thought weak and visionary— Burke

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planning, as his visionary father might have done, to go to Brazil to pick up a fortune— Van Doren

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Something is fantastic (see also FANTASTIC 2) which is or, more often, seems extravagantly fanciful or queer and hence incapable of belief or, sometimes, approval

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in words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; alike fantastic, if too new, or old— Pope

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his strange coming, his strange story, his devotion, his early death and posthumous fame—it was all fantastic— Cather

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a fantastic world inhabited by monsters of iron and steel— Bromfield

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Something is chimerical which is wildly or fantastically visionary or unreal

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an universal institutional church is as chimerical an idea as an universal empire— Inge

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the defeat was more complete, more humiliating . . . the hopes of revival more chimerical—Times Lit. Sup.

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Something is or one is quixotic which or who is motivated by extravagantly chivalrous devotion to visionary ideals

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quixotic as a restoration of medieval knighthood— Cohen

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to insist upon clemency in the circumstances would . . . have required quixotic courage— Buchan

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the economic notion that our present population . . . can live on this island and produce by their work a real income that will give them a rising standard of comfort and leisure, is utterly quixotic— Hobson

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Analogous words: *fictitious, fabulous, mythical, legendary, apocryphal: ideal, transcendent, transcendental, *abstract: Utopian (see AMBITIOUS): delusory, delusive (see MISLEADING): illusory, seeming, *apparent

Antonyms: real, actual

2 imaginative, imaginal, imaginable