imaginary

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English[edit]

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Etymology[edit]

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[edit]

Adjective[edit]

imaginary (comparative more imaginary, superlative most imaginary)

  1. Existing only in the imagination.
    Unicorns are imaginary.
  2. (mathematics, of a number) Having no real part; that part of a complex number which is a multiple of (called imaginary unit).

Synonyms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Expressions

Translations[edit]

Noun[edit]

The Tea room(+) is discussing this entry at the moment.
Please come along and share your opinions on this and the other topics being discussed there.

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) 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[edit]

  1. ^ Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (I)
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=imaginary&oldid=78566014"