imaginary — English Dictionary

Adjective

1. Existing only in the imagination.

   Examples

   imaginary friend

   Unicorns are imaginary.

   More examples (1)

   Wilt thou add to all the griefs I suffer / Imaginary ills and fancied tortures?

2. Relating or belonging to the imagination.

   Examples

   Fiction refers to imaginary stories.

3. Having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of √ (called imaginary unit).

   Usage

   • of a number

Noun

1. Imagination; fancy.

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   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. An imaginary number.

   Usage

   • Countable

3. 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.

   Examples

   More examples (3)

   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 […].

   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.

   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.

Adjective

1. not based on fact; existing only in the imagination

   Synonyms

   fancifulnotional

   Examples

   a small child's imaginary friends

   to create a notional world for oneself

Noun

1. (mathematics) a number of the form a+bi where a and b are real numbers and i is the square root of -1

   Synonyms

   complex numbercomplex quantityimaginary number

   Broader terms

   number