- imaginative
- imaginative, imaginal, imaginable, imaginary, though not synonymous, are sometimes confused because of their verbal likeness.Imaginative applies to something which is the product of the imagination or has a character indicating the exercise or the power of the imagination; thus, imaginative writings are often distinguished from such factual writings as historical, expository, and argumentative; an imaginative poet is one whose imagination heightens his perception of people and things{
it is a common fallacy that a writer . . . can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject matter, by using his "imagination" upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham— Cather
}{[workaday scientists] ... are prone to identify the poetical with the impractical, the imaginative with the imaginary, the fictional with the false— Muller
}Imaginal, meaning of the imagination or within the conceptive powers of the imagination, has been used, especially by psychologists, to fill the need for an adjective which refers to the imagination only as a function of the mind rather than as a creative power or to images as the mental representations which follow a sensation; thus, a person belongs to one imaginal type rather than to another because of his tendency to have sensory images of a particular kind (as visual, tactile, or auditory){perhaps they owe their imaginal coloration to some childhood experience— Cutsforth
}Imaginable often means little more than conceivable, but more precisely it may imply that the thing so qualified can be seen or apprehended in a clear mental image{St. Thomas was perhaps of all the apostles the one most easily imaginable in the present— Mackenzie
}{imaginary woes
}{Imaginary Conversations, a book by Walter Savage Landor giving imaginary dialogues and imaginary letters between famous persons of long ago
}{the vague unrest of a husband whose infidelities are imaginary— Glasgow
}Analogous words: imagining, fancying, realizing, conceiving (see THINK): creative, inventive (see corresponding verbs at INVENT)Contrasted words: *prosaic, prosy, matter-of-fact
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
