imaginary
Part of speech: adj
noun
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: human-sciences
mathematics
sciences
social-science
sociology
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. Although Descartes' usage was derogatory, the designation stuck even after the concept gained acceptance in the 18th century.
Base: imagine
Affixes: -ary
Inflected forms:
form: more imaginary
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: most imaginary
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: imaginaries
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: Existing only in the imagination.
pos: adj
examples: imaginary friend
Unicorns are imaginary.
Wilt thou add to all the griefs I suffer / Imaginary ills and fancied tortures?
gloss: Having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of √ (called imaginary unit).
pos: adj
gloss: Having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of √ (called imaginary unit).
pos: adj
gloss: Imagination; fancy.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
gloss: An imaginary number.
pos: noun
tags: countable
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
Derived words: imaginarily
imaginariness
imaginarity
nonimaginary
unimaginary
imaginary axis
imaginary friend
imaginary geometry
imaginary lat syndrome
imaginary museum
imaginary number
imaginary part
imaginary time
imaginary unit
purely imaginary → purely imaginary number
quater-imaginary
Translations:
lang: Afrikaans
word: imaginêr
lang: Basque
word: irudikari
lang: Bulgarian
word: имагине́рен
roman: imaginéren
lang: Czech
word: imaginární
lang: Dutch
word: imaginair
lang: Finnish
word: imaginaarinen
lang: Finnish
word: imaginaari-
lang: Galician
word: imaxinario
lang: German
word: imaginär
lang: Greek
word: φανταστικός
roman: fantastikós
lang: Hungarian
word: imaginárius
lang: Hungarian
word: képzetes
lang: Indonesian
word: imajiner
lang: Latvian
word: imaginārs
lang: Polish
word: urojona
lang: Portuguese
word: imaginário
lang: Russian
word: мни́мый
roman: mnímyj
lang: Spanish
word: imaginario
lang: Swedish
word: imaginär
lang: Tamil
word: கற்பனை
roman: kaṟpaṉai