imaginary

English

Etymology

From Middle English ymaginarie, ymagynary, from Latin imāginārius (“relating to images, fancied”), from imāgō, equivalent to imagine +‎ -ary.

The mathematical sense derives from René Descartes's use (of the French imaginaire) in 1637, La Geometrie, to ridicule the notion of regarding non-real roots of polynomials as numbers.[1] Although Descartes' usage was derogatory, the designation stuck even after the concept gained acceptance in the 18th century.

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ɪˈmæd͡ʒɪnəɹi/, /ɪˈmæd͡ʒɪnɹi/
  • (General American) IPA(key): /ɪˈmæd͡ʒɪˌn(ɛ)ɹi/
  • Audio (General American):(file)
  • Hyphenation: im‧a‧gin‧a‧ry

Adjective

imaginary (comparative more imaginary, superlative most imaginary)

  1. Existing only in the imagination.
    imaginary friend
    Unicorns are imaginary.
  2. Relating or belonging to the imagination.
    • 2003, Tom Conklin, Comprehension Cliffhanger Stories, page 31:
      Fiction refers to imaginary stories.
  4. (mathematics, of a number) Having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of −1 (called imaginary unit).
  5. (obsolete) To an extreme or incredible degree; fantastic.

Synonyms

Derived terms

Expressions

Translations

Noun

imaginary (plural imaginaries)

  1. Imagination; fancy. [from 16th c.]
    • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 324:
      By then too Mozart's opera, from Da Ponte's libretto, had made Figaro a stock character in the European imaginary and set the whole Continent whistling Mozartian airs and chuckling at Figaresque humour.
  2. (mathematics, countable) An imaginary number. [from 18th c.]
  3. (sociology) The set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society through which people imagine their social whole. [from c. 1975]
    • 1978, John Derrickson McCurdy, Visionary Appropriation, page 145:
      The sensory media are sensuous materials which prolong our bodily life into the surrounding world, and hence the media are imaginaries. These perceptually penetrated materials are " imaginaries " because they operate here in our living body […] .
    • 1994, Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining ..., page 51:
      For example, colonial motifs of many kinds became increasingly central to the British national imaginary from the mid-nineteenth century, while the imaginative significance of 'the soldier' has long been derived from, and helped to sustain, the linkage between national and military imaginaries.
    • 2015, Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer, Goethe Yearbook 22, page 96:
      While Oil, its extraction, and the global petroculture and its role in transforming the planet's climate undoubtedly play a crucial role in the Antropocene imaginary — to the extent that petrofiction has been construed not just as a genre but as a periodizing gesture of "petromodernity"  — it would hamper both the imagination and the root of petrofiction to restrict the range of this term to the encounter with fossil fuels within a carbon imaginary.

References

  1. ^ Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (I)
This page is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.