imagined
- 1Simple past and past participle of imagine.
He imagined the worst when the phone rang at midnight.
Nobody imagined the storm would knock out power for a week.
Note
One spelling does double duty. It is the simple past in she imagined, and the participle in had imagined and was imagined. That is the regular pattern for verbs ending in silent e. In older texts, watch for the obsolete meaning "contrived, devised," where imagined mischief means mischief schemed rather than pictured. The same spelling also serves as the past of imagin.
- 2Formed in the mind through conception or mental envisioning.
Like a character in a daydream, vivid in the mind but absent from the room.
Her imagined slights soon caused real friction at work.
The danger turned out to be entirely imagined.
Similarimaginary, fancied, illusory, perceived, invented
Note
Paired with real, it covers both possibilities at once: an injury real or imagined, a slight or danger whether or not it exists outside the mind. That frame is a natural home for the sense, usually around grievances, wrongs and threats. It does not take degrees, so avoid more imagined or most imagined. A thing is either imagined or it is not.
- 3Capable of existing only in the mind and never in the real world.
Such an imagined utopia could never function outside the pages of a novel.
An imagined dimension beyond time can be described but never visited.
Similarimaginary, hypothetical, theoretical, notional, fictional
Note
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice asks for help "with imagin'd speed": speed so great it can only be conceived, as fast as thought itself. The sense is rare now and has a literary, slightly heightened feel. The elided imagin'd belongs to the verse of the period. In modern prose, keep it for things that could exist only as ideas, such as utopias or impossible dimensions.
Less common meaning
- 4Relating to the imagination or produced by its workings.
Note
Here the word points to the faculty itself rather than to what it produces. When the Chorus of Henry V (1599) says the scene flies "with imagin'd wing," the wing belongs to imagination and carries the audience across distance. Like the "only conceivable" meaning, it is rare. It is best read as "of the imagination" and seldom chosen in new writing.
Showing meanings only.
imagined is a form of imagine
imagine, verb: To form a picture or idea of something in the mind, or to use the imagination to create new ideas. Full entry
- Spelling
- imagine → imagined: add -d
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /d/.
Use it in a sentence
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