imaginary

Pluralimaginaries

1. 1
   adjective

   Existing only in someone's imagination, not in reality.

   Children often invent imaginary companions to keep them company.

   The novel unfolds in an imaginary kingdom far from any real country.

   Similarfictional, fictitious, invented, made-up, pretend

   Oppositereal, actual

   Note

   The root sense of the word comes from Latin imāginārius, "relating to images, fancied," built on imāgō, an image. What is imaginary is pictured rather than present: an imaginary friend, a unicorn, or the "imaginary ills and fancied tortures" of Joseph Addison's Cato (1713). In that line Addison sets the word beside fancied as its near twin.

2. 2
   adjective

   Describing the part of a complex number that is a real multiple of the imaginary unit √−1, having no real component.

   The quadratic has no real solutions, only imaginary roots.

   Multiplying two imaginary numbers can produce a real result.

   Oppositereal

   Note

   A mathematician's adjective, said of numbers. Every complex number splits into a real part and an imaginary part. The imaginary part is a real multiple of the imaginary unit i, which is defined by i² = −1. A number whose real part is zero is called imaginary outright. Here the word is a fixed technical label and carries none of the doubt of the everyday "unreal" meaning.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A complex number with no real component; a real multiple of the imaginary unit.

   Each imaginary on the diagram sat along the vertical axis.

   The two imaginaries summed to a value with no real part.

   Note

   Mathematics turns the adjective for numbers into a noun here, so an imaginary is simply an imaginary number. The noun is countable, with the regular plural imaginaries. That lets a writer treat such numbers as objects in their own right, placing imaginaries on a diagram or adding two imaginaries together.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   The set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols shared by a social group, through which its members picture their society as a whole.

   Scholars study how a national imaginary shapes the way citizens see themselves.

   Shared myths and rituals form part of a community's collective imaginary.

   Note

   Social theory's noun for the picture a society holds of itself. It takes an adjective naming whose picture it is. Graham Dawson's Soldier Heroes (1994) traces colonial motifs in "the British national imaginary," and Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Krimmer, in Goethe Yearbook 22 (2015), write of "the Anthropocene imaginary." It can also be counted, as imaginaries, when a writer means several such shared frames.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The faculty of imagination; the mind's power of forming images and fancies.

   The poet's imaginary conjured whole worlds from a single image.

   Grief can darken the imaginary, filling idle hours with dread.

   Similarimagination, fancy

   Note

   As a noun for the imagination itself, it often comes with the and a collective modifier. Colin Jones's The Great Nation (2002) has Mozart making Figaro "a stock character in the European imaginary." Phrased that way, it sits close to the sociologist's shared imaginary. The difference is that this sense names the fancy itself, not a society's system of symbols.

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